
Average Office Worker Spends Less Than 3 Hours of the Day Working Productively - rubinelli
https://www.vouchercloud.com/resources/office-worker-productivity
======
justforfunhere
I had a manager once who would just divide the number of hours I stayed in
office by two and then tell me that that was the time I was actually doing
something useful. He did that for everyone in his team and kept it in mind
when planning for long term projects.

This heuristic seems to work pretty well for him. His planning was never far
from perfect and he did deliver quite a few large projects within the
timelines.

~~~
ubercow13
How is it useful to know the number of hours someone is actually working on a
project when planning? That seems to granular to be useful. It seems easier to
have a sense of what can be done in a day than an hour. Each hour is going to
vary a lot anyway.

~~~
ubermonkey
How else would one forecast?

If you need to accomplish TaskX, you work with the team that will do TaskX to
come up with a valid estimate of effort required to complete it -- say, 300
hours of work.

You _could_ just naively assume that this task would then be done in 300 hours
/ 8 hours per day / # of workers, but that assumes 100% productivity -- which
isn't true basically anywhere.

Ergo...

~~~
ubercow13
Even if you are estimating your own tasks and there aren't many unknowns, as a
developer I don't normally check in with myself every hour and ponder how much
I've achieved, so my idea of how much I can do in an hour is not going to be
too accurate. Then multiply the error by 300. At least if a team has daily
standups they'd be used to assessing their progress per day.

~~~
ubermonkey
(Nice name)

The thing is, though, for many business models being able to accurately
estimate time and cost is critical, and so is executing vs. that estimate.

It's nice to be able to say "I have no idea how long this will take," but it's
also a luxury not available to many (most?) developers.

------
JeffRosenberg
Ugh, just the idea that workers are "guilty of" stealing productive time from
their employers by "Making hot drinks" or "Discussing out of work activities
with colleagues."

~~~
mrob
Workers need unproductive activities, because otherwise the long days that the
unproductive activities make necessary would be intolerable.

I'd much rather work 4 hour days with no hot drinks or chatting than 8 hours
at a relaxed pace. I can do unproductive activities in my own time.

~~~
JeffRosenberg
I couldn't do even 4 hours in a hyper-focused mode without taking 3 minutes to
go get a cup of tea. That's not "unproductive activities", that's giving my
brain a short rest.

------
perfunctory
The current standard working week is 40 hours. 40 is not a magic number and
it's not a law of nature. We need to start a serious discussion about reducing
it. 32 would be a good start. Retaining the same pay. In case you worry it
will destroy the economy check out
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Working_time](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Working_time)

~~~
beatgammit
When I work from home, I get far more done in less time, yet so many employers
are stuck on discouraging working from home. In fact, I'm probably more
productive working 20 hours focused at home then 40 in the office.

I changed my work setup to be contact based (by project, not by hour), and I
now get more done in 20 hours than I did with 40 hours, and I feel that's
because I can:

\- take breaks without getting flak for it from management \- interact with
clients/partners when I choose to (email, IM, etc, all of which can be
muted/ignored) \- work longer when I feel I'm doing well, work less when I'm
distracted

However, every office has different expectations, so maybe mine was just
particularly bad. IDK.

------
drawkbox
The future is virtual, remote, and productive. It is cheaper, more robust to
team life changes and can select from a wider net which ultimately makes for
better people.

Offices are a distraction except for meetings, integrations, planning but for
actual work they are horrible.

Think of all the greats, they all had their own lab/study and that is where
the great work was done.

Funny thing is, even when we go to work at an office lots of the communication
is virtual internally via text/email/systems with people an room/office over,
next building, or other office in another city. When you deal with clients and
customers it is mostly virtual.

We should focus more on virtual communication in modern project
processes/management as it is the default even in an office for your co-
workers, customers and more. Remote working and virtual communication helps
that even if meetings/integrations are physical, focus and work flow can be
more tuned in.

------
tomhoward
I'd be unsurprised to learn that people aren't productive for much of their
work day in an office. I also don't think it's that big a deal – people aren't
paid for the time they spend thinking about work outside the office, and
thinking about work is often as important and valuable as completing it.

That said, this is a garbage study:

 _The study, conducted by www.vouchercloud.com, polled 1,989 UK office workers
all aged over 18 as part of research into the online habits and productivity
of workers across the nation. All respondents currently worked full-time in an
office role.

Respondents were initially asked, ‘Do you consider yourself to be productive
throughout the entire working day?’ to which the majority, 79% admitted that
‘no’ they weren’t. Just a fifth, 21%, believed that ‘yes’ they were productive
throughout the day.

The study asked then asked respondents, ‘If you had to state a figure, how
long do you think you spend productively working during work hours on a daily
basis?’ The results of this revealed the average answer to be ‘2 hours and 53
minutes’ of actual productivity in the workplace across all respondents._

It's PR fluff and not worthy of serious discussion.

------
erokar
How fitting that I'm reading this while at work.

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mc32
This is not surprising. People aren’t “on” as soon as 8am hits and “off” at 5.
Of course this can differ from occupation to occupation, but you can’t strive
to get people to 100%. You’ll burn them out. You also can’t say work at 100%
for 3-4 hrs and then go home. Productivity doesn’t work like that. You have to
allow for ebb and flow of thought and interactions but also avoid productivity
sapping interruptions.

------
josephjrobison
Unrelated but kind of related - when people hire freelancers, they may seem
expensive by the hour compared to a full timer, but when you take into account
this stat, that doubles the per hour cost of your full time employee, which
makes hiring freelancers a bit more attractive.

~~~
mcv
Unless freelancers are equally subject to this, and I don't see why they
wouldn't be.

~~~
analreceiver
When using platforms like Upwork, they are constantly being monitored and
screen captures are taken to make sure the hours being charged are work hours.

~~~
serpi
How can a screen capture capture thinking?

------
rgoulter
"it's easy to be distracted" reminds me of what Cal Newport seems to like
pointing out.

In "Deep Work", Newport also suggests distinguishing between 'shallow' and
'deep' activities. 'deep' = 'requires extended period of focus / attention'.
Shallow = e.g. replying to messages. \-- I think an important point is: even
without any of these distractions, you still wouldn't be getting more than 3
hours of deep work each day.

Albeit, not all work is deep. Meetings can be valuable. And not all the
"unproductive distractions" given in TFA are bad.

------
louhike
They just asked "If you had to state a figure, how long do you think you spend
productively working during work hours on a daily basis?". There were no
measurements made. So it is probably quite innacurate.

~~~
Veen
When I've tracked pomodoros, the average came to around three hours of
productive time. Anecdotal, I know, but I've often thought that it would be
nice to squeeze that three hours of work into three hours of clock time. Life
would be considerably more pleasant.

~~~
TeMPOraL
Huh. This is my self-evaluation trick I've been employing for a year or two
now.

I run pomodoros (standard, 25-min) whenever I'm trying to focus on work, and
aim to have as much of them as hours at work. I have three marks here: the
bronze standard = 100% ratio, i.e. 8 pomodoros for 8 hours of work. The silver
standard is 150% ratio, i.e. 12 pomodoros for 8 hours of work. The gold
standard is 200%, i.e. 16 pomodoros for 8 hours of work. Note that even the
gold standard is only about 6 hours and 40 minutes, because a pomodoro has 25
minutes.

I consider a day in which I hit the bronze standard to be a good day. That
adds up to about 3 hours 20 minutes of focused work time, so it's consistent
with your result, with the article, and with what I've seen reported around
HN. It's surprising how much you actually _can_ accomplish in that time, but I
find it frustrating that it can be difficult to get to even that on a regular
work day.

------
ahaferburg
The entire article is not much more interesting than the title. The more
interesting question is why. Why do workers procrastinate, why do managers
ignore it or don't do something about it. And while it might be true that
office workers need unproductive activities, it's a bit of a stretch from that
to "workers need 5 hours of unproductive activities for every 3 hours of
work". There's got to be a saner balance.

I don't really care about what 1000 people don't do. I'd rather learn why 10
people work the way they do, and how to change it.

------
devonkim
RescueTime tells me I’m spending at least 7 hours / day productive in my
terminal, IDEs, or web browsers. I’m obviously worth at least 3 times market
rate then!

------
znq
As just commented on a related thread
([https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19198649](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19198649))
this doesn't seem to be a problem for us, as since ever and always we gave
people the choice to work as much as they want and when they want. People take
breaks whenever they feel like. Go doing sports, play with their kids, run
errands. They even take whole days off to go surfing or skiing. And I really
don't mind. Because I do the same.

But then, if a server goes down late at night, people all the sudden show up
by themselves and fix problems. Also on a rainy Saturday or Sunday, people
will all the sudden be online and working.

Give people the opportunity to be in charge of their own work schedule, give
them the responsibility, make them feel that they're actually responsible and
they will shine.

I really don't want this to be a promotion and also because I just shared it
on the other thread, but I really think people (both business owners and
employees) should have a look at our just released company handbook which
covers a great deal how we work. If anyone thinks this is unrelated spam I'm
more than happy to remove it.

* [https://mobilejazz.com/company-handbook](https://mobilejazz.com/company-handbook) (landing page, if you want to get email updates)

* [https://mobilejazz.com/docs/company-handbook/mobile-jazz-com...](https://mobilejazz.com/docs/company-handbook/mobile-jazz-company-handbook.pdf) (direct link to the PDF for the HN crowd)

------
NoblePublius
What surrogate activities are you not doing right now so you can read this
comment?

------
beager
I think most of the griping in this thread will be unrelated to the article.
The article talks about real time-waste (surfing social media, personal
communications). From the headline, I was ready to rail against the definition
of “productively” but if you’re on Instagram all day, that’s a different
story.

Nevertheless, remote teams and flexible hours and maker time and all that,
yes!

------
cafard
Many years ago, I worked as a proofreader for a company that had us keep time
sheets for billing purposes. As I recall, my boss said that I charged about
six hours of every eight, and that this was above average. I don't remember
much idle time in there--perhaps some of it was waiting for proofs to be
ready.

------
skocznymroczny
Work distractions can be a bit misleading. A lot of work I do involves lengthy
unit test runs. Often I don't have anything better to do, even if I wanted to
work harder. I just have to patiently wait for my tests to finish because I
can move on with my work.

~~~
ThJ
In cases like these, we're often guilty of not finding something else to do in
the meanwhile. There's almost always _something_ productive one could do, even
something so simple as taking a quick look at your open issue tickets and
decide which ones to queue up next, or writing a quick email that you've been
putting off. The reason you don't do that is because you're looking for an
excuse to take a break and aren't motivated to look for other tasks.

~~~
sys_64738
Actually, no, this isn’t what they mean. The concentration level for unit test
runs is distracted much more if your thought process is preempted by another
work task, no matter how trivial. There’s zero fall out from surfing the WWW
for a few mins.

A case where it’s more productive to be skiving.

------
Tepix
Obligatory Office Space quote:

Bob Slydell: If you would, would you walk us through a typical day, for you?

Peter Gibbons: Yeah.

Bob Slydell: Great.

Peter Gibbons: Well, I generally come in at least fifteen minutes late, ah, I
use the side door–that way Lumberg can’t see me, heh–after that I sorta space
out for an hour.

Bob Porter: Da-uh? Space out?

Peter Gibbons: Yeah, I just stare at my desk, but it looks like I’m working. I
do that for probably another hour after lunch too, I’d say in a given week I
probably only do about fifteen minutes of real, actual, work.

... later ...

Bob Slydell: I’d like to move us right to Peter Gibbons. We had a chance to
meet this young man, and boy that’s just a straight shooter with upper
management written all over him.

------
iceninenines
Don't have open office internet: run in through a proxy server so tracking can
happen. People are free to use their own devices. Then, during a lunch period,
open up the office internet to news sites. Social media should be used on
personal devices off the clock. Not to micromanage or infantilize people, but
to prevent distractions for me too. Guest internet with a simple self-
registration should be a separate network (vlan & ssid) filtered for malware,
hate/terror sites, illegal activity and porn.

Also, productivity requires motivation and mission. If people aren't paid
enough or don't get to share in the profits, why should they kill themselves
for more company-only money? Meaningful co-ops and worker profit-sharing has a
chance to remedy the situation and make people care about a venture. The other
part is giant organizations having BS jobs without very much to do, let dead
weight type jobs accumulate because large organizations make managers look
good. OTOH, smaller shops tend to be more agile and not put up with any dead
weight. Perhaps a solution is a Richard Branson one: keep splitting up
organizations before they get too big so they're a loose-coupled confederation
of business units. Since big business pyramids drain money and agility from an
organization, try not to go there.

PS: I know a former DIA sysadmin who said numerous classified researchers lost
their careers by surfing for porn on known monitored networks. Why would
someone do that? It seems a shop like that should have monitors in the
hallways anonymously listing non-official business URLs people are visiting
from classified/unclassified networks to make publicly-obvious.

