How you’re wasting time at work

Although an average workday lasts for 8 hours, you work a lot less. There are always distractions waiting to break your productivity every day, and you might not even notice.

A study by Scoro looked into where your time gets lost at work and found that 89% of people waste time at work each day, with them using 60% or less available work time doing beneficial things. This works out that you’re only productive three working days out of five.

The biggest time-wasting activities at work included checking emails with 45.5%, browsing online with 28.8% and commuting 17.4%. Those who took part said that 42.3% of their time at work is being wasted in meetings and office workers said that there are just too many meetings. Most employees attend around 62 meetings every month, but more than half of that time is wasted, with 31 hours being spent in unproductive meetings.

Other time at work is spent on your lunch break, with the average person having a 30-minute break as well as at least one 15-minute coffee break each day. 30 minutes per day is spent checking emails and another two hours are wasted in meetings and spending time on social media.

On average, workers switch activities every 3 minutes and it can take up to 25 minutes to return to the original task. It’s best to stick to the task in hand too, as only 2.5% of workers can multitask without a decrease in performance.

Scoro suggested that in order to have a more productive day, you should only check emails three times a day. They also said that you should turn off our internet on your phone whilst at work as well as setting clear agendas for meetings, doing the most boring task first and setting 60-90 minute deadlines for each task.

They also suggested that it is more beneficial to focus on tasks which are more important to the company and try and break big tasks into smaller blocks of work.

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