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Why People Waste Time At Work?

Bored? Procrastinating? Getting Nothing done?  Why do people waste so much time at work?

Peter Fleming is a Professor of Business and Society and comes out with some disturbing facts –

  • The average British worker spends 36 days a year answering work emails.
  • The average British worker receives 9,000 work emails a year.
  • The average British work wastes 18 months of their lives commuting.

Other research found that 80% of employers thought it was acceptable to contact employees outside business hours.

The recession makes things worse. People are worried about their jobs, they work long hours and can experience burn out. 

Can people die from overwork?

An interesting condition is that of Karoshi. This clearly shows the impact of stress on a person’s physical and mental health.  Karoshi is a Japanese term literally meaning death from overwork.  The actual medical cause of death may be a heart attack or a stroke due to stress and a poor diet due to overwork.

It was first recorded in 1969, when a 29 year old worker in a newspaper died. However, several more cases occurred in the 1980's with high ranking business executives.  They died in their prime, suddenly, with no previous signs of illness. The media quickly picked up on this phenomenon and labelled it 'Karoshi'.  In 1987, the Japanese Ministry of Labour began to publish statistics on levels of Karoshi.

Some examples of Karoshi include:

  • A man who worked 110 hours a week and had a heart attack at age 34.
  • Another man worked 3000 hours and had no time off in a 15 day period before he had a stroke at 37.
  • A 22 year old nurse died from a heart attack after working 34 hours continuous duty five times a month.

This excessive overwork puts physical and mental pressure on the person.

So is this the best way to work? If we spend so much time commuting, answering emails and so on, are we working as productively as we could?

There are solutions, but they will depend on the job you do.

One way to avoid commuting is to work at home. With more and more advanced technology, the ability to log in remote servers and work away from the office increase. If you spend two hours a day travelling and eight hours a day working, then theoretically, you could spend ten hours a day working in your own home. Or eight hours without the stress of travel.

Think of how you spend your time. Do you spend all your time answering emails, only for more emails to come in? Only to find at the end of the day that all you have done is answer emails and the big project you need to finish hasn't been touched. A way to solve this is to limit the times you spend on emails.  Perhaps aim to look at them from 9 – 11am and then from 3.30 – 5pm.  Then the rest of the day complete larger tasks. Do the same with phone calls, only answer them at certain times of the day. If someone calls out of those times, take a message or leave your answer machine on.

You could also consider working in different locations. If you find you are constantly disturbed in your own office, perhaps go and work in the canteen or the library or in someone else’s office. In addition to providing an environment more conducive to concentrating on work, a change of scenery can also have a positive benefit and encourage you to improve your focus.

It can be hard to focus. We have more and more things demanding our attention – phones, emails, texts, skype calls, facebook and social media and on and on.  By trying to focus and reducing these distractions we can focus more clearly on the task at hand and be more productive.

Some steps to take

Think about your job and how you work.

  • Could you change where you work?  Home/Another office/the library.
  • Could you change when you work? Is flexi-time allowed to reduce travel time? Do you work better early evening or late at night?
  • Can you focus your time spent on emails and phone calls?
  • Can you block out time in your diary to spend on larger projects and pieces of work?

This might sound too much like hard work, but a few minutes thinking about how you work and how you organise yourself could really help.  We are all different and all have different types of jobs, so what would work best for you will depend on what suits you as an individual.

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