We spend 180 days of our working life correcting spelling mistakes, 145 days on logins and one month on scheduling meetings. We need more automation!
It's actually frightening how we humans spend our lifetimes: We sleep a third of our lives, look at our smartphone for almost a decade, and zap through streaming services for four months - and then often we don't even watch a movie.
A study by the Maryland and Delaware Enterprise University Partnership has now looked at how we spend our working hours. The results impressively show where we can improve.
WTF - unproductive routine activities
The researchers asked 5,000 office workers in the U.S. and the U.K. about their workday. They determined how many minutes the respondents spend on unproductive activities during a normal working day. They then extrapolated the results to a working life and arrived at the "Weighted Total Futility" (WTF).
Here are some of the results:
- Correcting spelling mistakes, 180 working days: individual words are misspelled so frequently that they alone take up several days of working life. "Thnaks" is the most common typo in English.
- Logins, 145 workdays: The average office worker spends nearly half a year typing, recovering and renewing passwords.
- Unresponsive staring at the screen, 145 working days: for example, when a web page loads or the Internet doesn't work for once.
Most of the time, it's routine activities that waste a lot of time. Activities like rejecting Windows updates, closing pop-up windows or deleting emails consume several weeks of a working life.
Formatting documents, presentations or tables also takes several weeks. Scheduling meetings consumes a whole month. Draft emails that are never sent consume two days.
Inefficient use of technology
Technology is making our everyday working lives more efficient in many ways. But our use of technology is often not efficient. That's why technology needs to evolve. For example, facial recognition is increasingly replacing passwords and autocorrect functions are reducing typing errors.
Meetings were not included in the study. If they were included, they would probably increase the WTF many times over. Few things are as time-consuming as meetings - and they often produce few or no results.
Automate routine activities
Regular FOM Magazine readers already know that FOM software can make meetings more efficient . However, FOM software can also standardize and automate many routine activities in the preparation and follow-up of meetings.
For example, agenda templates and participant lists can be reused, meeting minutes are created automatically, and standardized invitations are sent at the push of a button.
If you consider how much work time is lost correcting spelling mistakes, formatting documents or sending out invitations, FOM standardizations can lead to enormous time savings.
If you then accumulate these time savings across the entire organization, then even seemingly small automations can bring about large efficiency gains.
Do you already use FOM software in your organization?
Write to us at contact@fom-magazin.de.
