
In an 8-Hour Day, the Average Worker Is Productive for 2 Hours and 53 Minutes - sharjeelsayed
https://www.inc.com/melanie-curtin/in-an-8-hour-day-the-average-worker-is-productive-for-this-many-hours.html
======
Harkins
There's a trick in this clickbait:

> According to Bureau of Labor Statistics, the average American works 8.8
> hours every day. Yet a study of nearly 2,000 full-time office workers
> revealed that most people aren't working for most of the time they're at
> work.

The plain reading is that this article is based on BLS data. The BLS makes
huge amounts of data available (and is friendly about answering questions),
and the 8.8 hour figure is really theirs:
[https://www.bls.gov/tus/charts/chart1.pdf](https://www.bls.gov/tus/charts/chart1.pdf)

But the second sentence is about unrelated research not conducted by the BLS,
even if you trust that it exists.

This data looks bizarre. 23 minutes of smoke breaks? Only 15% of Americans
smoke
([https://www.cdc.gov/tobacco/data_statistics/fact_sheets/adul...](https://www.cdc.gov/tobacco/data_statistics/fact_sheets/adult_data/cig_smoking/index.htm)),
so if 85% of people spend 0 minutes a day smoking the other 15% spent 153
minutes per work day smoking. That can't be right, so this list must be the
average time spent on an activity of all the people who reported engaging in
it, which makes it pretty useless for understanding the overall situation it
purports to talk about.

Assuming a study was done, this is probably self-reported data of a self-
selected population. Ask 2,000 websurfers to break down their yesterday or
last week of work and you're not going to get reliable data.

Without an accounting of methodology (or at least a citation), this article is
an infohazard. People might read it an accidentally take it seriously, or
remember these numbers but not remember they were completely unsupported.

~~~
PhasmaFelis
Yeah, very bizarre. She's claiming that the average American works spends 23
minutes a day on smoke breaks, _and_ 26 minutes a day looking for a new job,
_and_ 17 minutes a day "preparing hot drinks", etc. Something is completely
bogus here.

~~~
im3w1l
> 17 minutes a day "preparing hot drinks"

This figure I can believe.

~~~
falcolas
As can I. As with the smoke breaks, it becomes a water cooler moment - a
socially acceptable time to talk with colleagues about personal lives and the
occasional work-related meeting.

------
natoliniak
Since the article doesn't specify what types of professions were studied, thus
I am skeptical of its conclusion. While this ~3hr/day productivity might be
true for typical corporate/office workers, but they make up only a small
percentage of the total work force! What about the productivity of bus
drivers, doctors, cooks, masons, mechanics? Somehow I think that the average
roofer doesn't spend ~2hrs/work day reading social media and news websites.

~~~
ramblerman
The title should be fixed but the article implies as much.

"Yet a study of nearly 2,000 full-time office workers".

------
acty1
This makes a lot of sense and explains a lot of the reactions I have berm
getting since tracking my concentration meticulously with Toggl.

I work as a remote consultant and track everything down to the second.

"Filling out" timesheets and answering "how much I worked" a non issue.

I've been getting accolades for how much work I accomplish... even when I
clock only 3-4 hours a day.

~~~
beambot
How much time do you spend tracking everything? (I assume this is accounted
for on a second-by-second accounting.)

~~~
acty1
I do it on the fly as in when I context switch.

Takes about 10 seconds max (copy paste ticket #, type meeting name, etc)

With a context switch every 15mins or quicker... probably easily 1 minute or
1.5 minutes per hour of work.

So somewhere like 1-2% "tax" on my time.

In practice though...I feel like an athlete and training my concentration and
tracking results.

Having those few seconds sometimes helps you align efforts better

------
Ace17
This way of tracking worker concentration raises a lot of questions,
especially in an era where we are _surrounded with stuff designed to grab our
concentration_.

What if access to social media is made impossible? What did the numbers look
like when it didn't exist at all? What happens to the 44 minutes? Does the
"productive time" get increased? Or does the "news checking time" gets
increased instead to compensate?

What happens during a weeks a 2048-like / google-pacman game has just been
released? Does the "productive time" goes down to the toilet? Should we
consider ourselves fundamentally less productive, and reduce the official
workday time to 1h during this period?

What if the underlying phenomenom actually is "1/8th of work time = news
checking", instead of "1h of work time = news checking", as the article
suggests?

Please let's not jump to conclusions too fast ; the reasons why we're not
working 100% of our 8-hour workdays have almost nothing to do with the reasons
why Ford workers weren't working 100% of their 16-hour workdays.

~~~
loudandskittish
> What if access to social media is made impossible? What did the numbers look
> like when it didn't exist at all? What happens to the 44 minutes? Does the
> "productive time" get increased? Or does the "news checking time" gets
> increased instead to compensate?

In the olden days, it was "newspaper time" instead of "Facebook time," so I'd
guess the numbers would look similar.

~~~
Xoros
I remember long ago, working on a security job to pay my studies (in France,
so not for tuition but for everyday life).

I was on a semi public bus company, in charge of opening secured doors in the
morning. The front hostess arrived and stated "Ah ! The newspaper ! It's the
first task of the morning !"

Well, it was not, because she made her coffee first :-)

------
rdlecler1
Maybe give everyone the last 2.5 hours off every Friday and they won't spend
that time during the week looking for a new job.

------
cperciva
The original source of this appears to be a survey performed by vouchercloud
([https://www.vouchercloud.com/blog/office-worker-
productivity...](https://www.vouchercloud.com/blog/office-worker-
productivity/)). Interestingly, the "2h 53m" value is claimed to be the
average value reported by the 1989 "UK office workers aged 18+" surveyed.

The survey also included a list of non-work activities and asked for each
activity (a) whether they were guilty of spending time on that activity, and
(b) if yes, how much time they spent. For example, 19% spent time searching
for new jobs, and _of those who spent time searching for new jobs_ the average
time spent was 26 minutes. These add up to a mere 94 minutes of "wasted time"
per day, suggesting that either respondents severely underestimated the time
they spent working, severely underestimated the time they wasted, or there's
another 3.5 hours/day of time spent non-productively on things other than the
10 options listed in the survey.

------
eksemplar
I'm skeptical about these, because each time we've tracked worker
productiveness they've worked around 6 hours out of the 7,5 they are paid to
on average. The only way we'd get someone spending that much time on news/SoMe
is when our workers are bored.

Like an IT tech waiting for a consultant to call back on a priority task or
when someone simply doesn't have enough things to do.

We do lose a lot f time to things like chitchat, but I think our overall
productivity and happiness require the freedom for people to do so.

I don't think the points of the article are wrong though. We have people who
work less than the standard 37 work week at certain periods in their lives,
typically younger parents, like 30-34 hour weeks, and they are much more
productive and score much higher on employee satisfaction. But I do think the
research is a tad thwarted by coming out of American workplaces and that it
isn't useful for every office space.

~~~
gexla
Maybe this depends on the job. I can do tech support all day long. Programming
comes with productivity traps such as difficulty getting into a zone,
procrastination due to feeling overwhelmed due to deadlines or project
difficulty and limits on creative productivity. My brain begins to melt after
4 hours of straight problem-solving on average. Problem-solving requires
creativity, which burns out and leads to busy work.

~~~
eksemplar
It includes our programmers who are some of the most productive workers. A
couple of them are task focused almost the entire time they are at work.

Of course we include things like getting stuck, or brainstorming solutions as
productive activities.

------
groceryheist
In my experience consulting in boring offices of companies that provide
business reporting and compliance services a lot of the people only have a few
hours of work to do most of the time. But a lot of the processes are manual
and brittle and so every so often there is a crisis and if they didn't have
everyone to minimize the impact of the crisis on their customers they would
lose business fast.

I bet there are a lot of companies where productivity is low because people
don't make extra work for themselves, do what they need to meet low
expectations but the company needs to keep people around because they can't
build processes that don't need the people.

------
shams93
If you try to work 16-18 hours to compensate the damage done to cognitive
abilities can drop that number to 45 minutes. Now as s rote worker wearing a
couple different hats I get the most out of 8 hours by changing tasks to keep
my concentration going shifting between development, was and Dev ops tasks or
writing documents.

------
SKYRHO_
I don't know how they can 'average' the american worker. Due to the obvious
attempt to make this article seem relevant to as many readers as possible, I
would have found it more interesting if it were a bit more specific.

------
Mz
Reminds me of an article I read years ago that a parent decided they could
cope with homeschooling their kid after they followed them around at school
and concluded they were only learning for one to two hours a day, not eight.

------
nuna
I have 4-6 hours of hyper focus, the rest i use for emails, spreadsheets etc

~~~
isostatic
I get 4-6 hours a week. All it takes is 3 meetings during the day (including
the 30 minute "standup") and that pretty much writes off the day.

~~~
nuna
oh I meant a day, but I agree unnecessary meetings throw me off

------
moomin
This falls to 1 hour 30 for a 10 hour day.

------
teekert
I just want to say thanx for changing the title.

------
sigi45
Bullshit.

I'm not reading an hour Internet pages non work related. And if i would, i
wouldn't count this as my working our.

Not calling my partner every day for 18 minutes at work.

What a crappy article.

~~~
ndh2
Are you assuming that this article was written about you, personally? Because
that is what your answer seems to imply.

~~~
sigi45
You are right, the article itself says something about avg. worker.

I had other similar article in mind when i wrote my comment.

