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Tech Makes Working Harder
Ant wrote to mention a C|Net article exploring U.S. workers' productivity. People say they actually accomplish less now than they did a decade ago. Research blames technology as the culprit. From the article: "Technology has sped everything up and, by speeding everything up, it's slowed everything down, paradoxically ... We never concentrate on one task anymore. You take a little chip out of it, and then you're on to the next thing ... It's harder to feel like you're accomplishing something.'"
Well, without technology, I'd be unemployed, so in that sense, I guess I really am working harder because of it.
This sounds more like a self-discipline problem than a problem with technology to me. When I have an important task to work on, somehow, I manage to concentrate on it. It's called prioritization, and it's something that people have had to deal with since a naked ape was put in charge of making sure the fire stays lit.
The study surveys people. The people feel like they get a smaller percentage of their work done.
This is just the press being stupid again.
One quote I have on my white board:
Learn the difference between busyness and accomplishment.
I don't know who said it but I appreciate it.
Or maybe it's the ear we live in. We're pushed so hard (must be ready 24 hours a day, while living three lives at once), that we're so tired/fed up with it we work less. Think of it like an army, if you march for a week without proper rest the last 3-4 days will be much slower than if you marched 6 days then took a rest on the 7th.
We push ourselvs untill our wills or body breaks. Theres no reason to care for typing in spread sheet numbers or carrying boxs, so we just do it and end up with half a job done.
Maybe if work was more rewarding (forget money, it's no real reward in this sense) and we weren't expected to be on call 24 hours a day, we would get a good rest and work three times as well (hence productive).
I like muppets.
If people get more communications (like email) about work, they will feel like there is more to be done. The article and summary both say that people feel like they are less productive, not that they actually are.
What I think is happening is that you have a lot of people who are new to computers so it slows them down. I think you'll really see productivity increase as more people who grew up using computers (like myself) enter the workforce.
Its regulations.
Seems that anytime something high profile goes down all sorts of new regulations come piling on and those filter down very quickly.
the amount of paperwork I have to go through to move even simple projects through work is ridiculous. We estimate that the average developer spends almost 15% of their time on paperwork that was never needed or required before.
About the only way technology slows me down if it does is that there are more ways for colleagues to interrupt me.
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
When you think back a few years, finding out something that took horribly long to compute was a task. Lots and lots of people with calculators and/or even "old" computers, who punched cards and fed it to huge machines, then they got a result and after lots of sweat, breakdowns and tears, they finally got a result. They then went ahead, recalculated it, formatted it, a team of statistics professionals were put to the task and finally, you had some revelation and you were proud. Mystified how you could even make it possible.
Today, you pick your sample, toss it into some kinda machine and go for lunch. You come back, your results are neatly printed and statistically perfectionized on your desk.
The result is probably the same. But which would make you feel more satisfied?
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Yeah, but with technologies like cell phones, laptops, broadband, Blackberrys - we can take the work we didn't finish and do it at home. Oh, wait ...
[Insert pithy quote here]
That touching up a PowerPoint presentation for the 17th time is "accomplishing something"...
No folly is more costly than the folly of intolerant idealism. - Winston Churchill
The tech part is entirely neutral in the equation.
The real issue here is management. Because information is available, management often believe they do need it.
Often, that's pretty far from the truth. People spend so much time now gathering useless figures, processing those, and presenting them that they often don't bother to take care of the issues that don't readily fit into numeric analysis, or worry about whether they're introducing noise into the signal (which only needs to be filtered out again later).
What people need to do is take a step back and determine what they really need to do their job, and get a process in place that'll automate delivery of the figures they actually need to them when they're needed.
That way, they'll likely find that the job does increase in efficiency.
Not to mention that tech has only added to the problem of employers thinking they rule your life...expecting you to stay late every night and work on weekends.
Its funny...but I'm sure I'm not the only one here who wishes for simpler times when life was a bit slower.
Buy Steampunk Clothing Online!
"Technology has sped everything up and, by speeding everything up, it's slowed everything down, paradoxically ... We never concentrate on one task anymore. You take a little chip out of it, and then you're on to the next thing ... "
+1 true.
I had to post a reply to this even though I was right in the middl
At a knowledge management conference, I saw the results of a study of how programmers spend their time at a well-established, very large and profitable software company. They spent 75% of their time using Outlook dealing with emails. Less than a quarter of the time went into using a development environment or testing tools.
The problem is that too many people can reach too many people with too little effort. Every incoming email, IM, or call demands attention and attenuates accomplishment.
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
There is virtually no way to make a rational and reasonable argument about this. Technology is not just about worker productivity it is about how transactions are done between businesses. Money flows electronically between banks; ERP systems help schedule work orders, raw materials purchase, plant employee scheduling; Databases track client interactions, purchases, bank transactions...the list is long. People are not disciplined in their use of time and waste it sending/replying to meaningless e-mails, reading ones that don't concern them. Some systems do hamstring employees by forcing them to work in ways that are counterproductive but these are few. Turn of your Blackberry vibrator so it doesn't break your concentration every time you get an e-mail. Kill that Outlook pop-up telling you there is a new mail message. Forward your phone two hours a day and concentrate on tasks that require it. There is a sense that more is expected and it is. Technology has made faster trade requiring faster decisions and task turn-around. People have decided to compete on that level. The market economy encourages work to the max and without limits. Globalization has increased this effect. Blame capitalism not technology. Stop blaming an individual casue for the resulting problems - it's a question of dynamics that involve the entire system and not just one or two parts. But that would require that people inform themselves and actually think instead of whine and complain.
Intelligence is no guarantee of wisdom
print the article out, give it to my employer and leave at 2:30 today. Or maybe I should reconsider...
The whole idea of an average worker is shot, riddled like swiss cheese.
accurately define good according to a criteria and seek it out.
And furthermore, I think that society today ...
What? One billion songs? wow! I still gotta get that new Santana CD. Let me see if it hit Amazon yet. Oh, cool, there's a sale on Digital cameras!
Now, where was I?
Never ask for directions from a two-headed tourist! -Big Bird
I wonder if the give away of 10 video ipods was calculated to be almost at the same time (but just before) the announcement they'd scheduled for Feb 28? Coincidence? I think not!
Rumor has it that Apple will announce new and improved video ipods with all conceivable features including factory chrome!
.. Blub falls right in the middle of the abstractness continuum. -- Paul Graham
From the article, it's not that we actually accomplish less, it's that we think we accomplish less. We're stressed out, probably due to the fact that we're doing more work-- regardless of the "accomplishment" factor, which is, as I understand it, opinion based.
Take it easy.
Take it easy? I'll take it anyway I can get it . . .
For *actual* work. Email, IM, phone for talking all you like *about* it. If the job doesn't arrive in the system it *isn't* work which needs to be done. It works for pretty much every case where one person asks another to do something.
e.g.
http://freshmeat.net/projects/requesttracker/
Oh and systems like these fit really nicely into workflow frameworks too.
Deleted
"This sounds more like a self-discipline problem than a problem with technology to me. When I have an important task to work on, somehow, I manage to concentrate on it. It's called prioritization, and it's something that people have had to deal with since a naked ape was put in charge of making sure the fire stays lit."
1. It has everything to do with technology enabling a 24/7 365 work enviornment where it is acceptable and possible at any point in time to get a new "top priority", "problem", "fire", etc, which you are expected to respond to just because you "can". The more connected and "reachable" you are, the more "priorities", "side-tracks", "etc." you will have.
2. It's not about self-discipline. For a good # of people, it's about their manager calling them to give them the latest "top priority" every day; which changes. And when you say you didn't complete "B" because "A" was said to be "priority #1, critical!", the reply you most often get is "I thought we bought you that new laptop a while back, the FASTER one? So why isn't it WORKING FASTER?"
We're not talking entry-level work here either.
The problem, as I see it, is that instant communication often results in managers demanding instant responses. While they can bring up reports quickly that simply pull in the facts and figures stored in a system, asking the analysis to work that way is ridiculous. Yet it happens.
On many projects I have seen lately, there's an expectation, particularly of tech workers, to be able to come up with something immediately. If a project is two weeks' worth of work, then two continguous weeks is plenty of time to do it. They fail to understand the need to plan, look over things with fresh eyes, and plan some more. I have seen too many projects get sidelined by poor planning, and effectively getting redone or shelved, at great cost.
People are not binary supercomputers. If they were, well, we wouldn't need them to look at things. Yet management treats all resources as instant response resources.
If management will continue to consider resources the same, they need to know that the garbage collection in the human brain is bad. There are memory leaks everywhere, and so starting and stopping tons of processes a day results in highly consumed resources, and little productivity.
Of course, any semi-decent manager would know that. Unfortunately, they're often kept in check by sociopaths who run companies.
Linux - because it doesn't leave that Steve Ballmer aftertaste.
... to slack off. Agreed that technology causes us to be distracted more often... but it also speeds up certain tasks in the process. Now if you don't want to work...
There are just way too many distructions. As a designer/developer I think I produce actually more everyday, but I learned long time ago to filter out the distractions that the technology is creating. I stopped using the IMs, chatrooms long time ago, actually 6 years ago. (To be honest I have ICQ running again for the past 2 months, to talk to my cousin, who is in Israel, but I limit the talk to about 20 minutes a day.) /. is another place where I spend at least 20 minutes a day. Then there are a couple of breaks. All in all, after everything, I spend 7-8 hours a day actually working. Designing, reviwing business requirements, having short team meetings (1-2 times a week, 30 minutes each,) and then it is all developing: coding coding coding.
So if I, as a developer (contractor,) who has constant access to the Internet can concentrate on work It would seem it should be even easier for other people.
But it is not so, I know it because I see it. Some people have no time to work at all. Between the phone-calls, IM chats and meetings, the actual work is constantly left for the later.
The reason why things get done at the end is not because of technology, but because there are people who know how to limit their use of technology to only the things that are important at work.
You can't handle the truth.
One could argue with how worker productivity is measured (I don't have a clue about that), but it's at least a data point. The article offers no data points. Rather it offers anecdotes and how people feel.
I am by no means a tech "fan-boy", I suspect that we have redefined productivity to include how effectively we deal with technology (see, it's recursive). I doubt that it has much to do with goods and services, but I'm just pulling that out of my hat. Much like the article.
- 97.3% of all statistics are made up
"It's harder to feel like you're accomplishing something."
First, less productive depends on what you're comparisons are based on. Second, could it be that the perception is that we are less productive, because we don't feel like we're working hard?
I went from working in the Army for a number of years to networking and programming where I make a lot more money. However, I felt like I was working much harder when I was getting paid less. Does that mean I'm not working as hard or I'm less productive? I would work for hours and hours everyday in the military and get little to nothing accomplished. I just think we need to realize that technology may make things seem like less work but that doesn't always equal less productivity.
Do what is right and let the consequence follow
Tech has nothing to do with it. Lots of people seem to love to say "Oh, I'm so busy, I'm rushing everywhere". It makes them feel important, it gives an impression of being invaluable to the company and most of all it's a defence mechanism - "I couldn't possibly do that project as well, just look at how rushed I am". Most of the time when you actually analyse the work they are doing, it's no more than the relaxed guy who just sits and slowly plods through his work.
... that economic productivity now is something like double what it was back then. This is particularly true in America (although measures of productivity in Europe generly understate the gains compared to the USA).
Why is everyone taking this measure of how people feel as being established fact? People may feel like they're getting less done, but the economic value of what they do is much higher.
Simon Hibbs
Businesses that have moved to 24-hour operations, bosses who micromanage and longer commutes add to the problem, they said, while downsizing leaves fewer workers doing the work of those who left. ... Finally, there's a trend among companies to measure job performance like never before.
These are key words in the article, if you put aside the technology which works no worse and probably better than a decade ago. You can squeeze the juice from an orange but at some point there is no juice left to squeeze. High property prices meaning you have to live miles away, increased pension and healthcare burdens, the hassle of just living in C21, absurd management gurus with onerous, people-hating theories eagery taken up by bonus-obsessed managers - these are more fundamental problems than technology. And all this before you even turn up for the job which in a modern corporation has increasing echoes of slavery, especially considering the stupendous earning gap between rich and poor. It's amazing most folks achieve as much as they do, and as tolerantly.
Las qué passoun
tournoun pas maï
I remain skeptical. While this CNet article matches what researches have been studying for years, for example, this paper from MIT published originally in 1991, it's only measuring people's perceptions, rather than hard economic data. The economic indicators of the last 5 years have shown huge boosts in worker productivity in the US (ignoring last quarter's results). That directly contradicts the CNet article.
Yes, the paper from MIT makes the case that there are many factors which can increase a person's productivity, and our gains in productivity could have come from other sources than technology, but the question remains: is this true, or simply a matter of perception?
If I exchange a couple quick e-mails with a coworker in another building, that feels like I did a lot less than if I had to play phone tag for two hours before getting ahold of her to talk. Same amount of work - less perceoved work.
If I transfer a couple sums of money online between my accounts, it feels like I did a lot less work than actually going to the bank and doing the transactions face to face (possibly with a wire transfer thrown in). Same amount of work - less perceoved work.
The separate issue glossed over in the article - about how management has changed - is IMHO the only significant question. Unfortunately, it got sidelined by the sensationalism of the headline
argumentum ad fallacium: Fallacy of defining a fallacy which allows one to dismiss the argument in question.
While the survey may be subjective, it seems to me there should be a limit to how much we can do individually before we are too busy getting nothing done. Technology has freed us to do so much more, and we have risen to the challenge! However, as technology continues to improve our ability to communicate, it also seems to be eroding our ability to stay on task. How many of us drop everything the moment we hear {our phone/pager ring | email notification sound | door bell}. How long does it take to get back on task after the disruption?
Just like a PC with too many tasks to do - each task takes longer and longer to complete as it is starved of CPU cycles.
I'm in my right mind and I have the answer to everything!
The study doesn't even try to determine if workers are less productive. It was basically a poll that determined that a lot of people don't feel like they accomplished everything they needed to accomplish.
They may in reality be 5 times (arbitrary figure*) more productive, but feel rushed and feel like they didn't finish everything.
I have to call BS on this article.
*I figure I can use arbitrary figures if the article can make arbitrary conclusions.
The problem is that technology is used to 'automate' outdated, meaningless, inefficient business processes. Rather than using technology as an enabler, businesses view it as a panacaea; instead, they should take a tabula rasa approach and re-evaluate ALL business processes to see if they are still relevant to prevailing business conditions. Doing this first and then automating gives you much more bang for the buck. Simply automating a brain-dead procedure falls under the rubric of 'premature optimisation'.
'He who has to break a thing to find out what it is, has left the path of wisdom.' -- Gandalf to Saruman
People say they actually accomplish less now than they did a decade ago.
When are you going to learn - don't listen to what people say. As much as middle managers would like us to believe, perception is not reality, except at the quantum level, and I can't remember the last time I was in a meeting with a neutrino.
People tend towards believing that they are good and hardworking. It's all too easy for an individual to say, "Oh yes, I am so busy, and I wish I could get more done." It's very difficult to say, "Yeah, I have all sorts of free time now that I could be doing something productive with, but I'm not," because believing that is tantamount to believing that you're lazy.
I would almost argue that multiple survey results that showed a trend towards people believing that they're not getting as much done are indicative of the opposite - that people are getting plenty more done, have plenty more free time, and feel a stronger urge to deny that.
Web 2.0 == Giant Blogspam Circle Jerk
I have found that I am less productive now because my co-workers and managers need to know my job as well. I have to cross train someone else in my duties, who has their own already, and show everyone who touches the results of my work how I came about them so that they can recreate them if they want to. I was also informed in my last performance review that I need to document "how to maintain the network if something happens and you are not here."
Technology has created the desire for the knowledge base of one individual to be shared instantaneously with any other individual just like files can. This is unrealistic and extraordinarily time consuming. I understand the need for documentation and back up scenarios, but when it comes down to it, forcing everyone to shadow everyone else causes nothing to get done. People need to be allow to be the experts in their fields, yet replaceable by other experts in their field rather than having the ability of the janitor to fill in if the expert is out.
So what is it...?
Do Americans work to much or not enough?
If we are working too much and doing less then what are we complaining about?
Bah, Time for a vacation.
I've been under working overtime for too long.
I know what you mean... I rarely have time to do anything but take a little chip out of a computer and run.. no time to grab some nics or video cards!
Always have to be off to the next score!
I only look human.
My mother is a halfling and my dad is an ogre, so that makes me an Ogreling
So true. Context switching wastes clock cycles, but pre-emptive scheduling is still a must. I have tried to learn to manage my own time from operating systems studies. I still have a lot to learn. Especially IRC is bad. Just have to check new messages frequently. These things can help to improve workflow:
- Use laptop, without network connection, so you can find a quiet and comfortable place
- If you listen to music, make sure it's pleasant
- Think about room's lightning and improve it if necessary
- There's on/off button on your cellphone
- Noisy computer distracts your mind
- Keep only tabs related to your work open in your browser
- Human mind takes ~15 minutes to concentrate on a subject, so that's a good minimum running time of a process
- Meditation and yoga can help on concentration
Who is John Galt?
Can't remember where it was, but someone asked :"Years ago we were all told that computers would allow us to do more, faster, and we'd have more free time because the machines would work for us. What happened?" One of the answers was that computers in the service of people can really save time and effort - but computers in the service of industry, business and the giant money-making corporations, are used as tools to make us do more in less time, serving money rather than humanity. And why? Because someone at the top wants a newer, bigger car.
Personally I long for the days of yore, when I'd leave the house and if someone rang me, I wasn't in, and there was no voicemail. With mobile phones, voicemail, email on the move, and more people every morning on the Underground with laptops doing work in the half-hour it takes to get into central London, it's no wonder people think they're falling behind - we're no longer dealing with jobs that are "When you're finished, go home," there's always something waiting to be attended to, emails coming in from around the world, and workers rarely get to sit back and think, "Good job."
Ten years ago there was no
Plus, between the emails, IMs, cell phone calls, text messages, and all the friends blogs and news sites I have to keep up with, who has time for work?
Of course, some people have a job really is about communicating with people. For them these advances might make them more effective. But for a person with a job that requires spooling up a complex problem and long periods of concentration, an interruption filled environment is death.
But those of us bitching about it have only ourselves to blame. We choose to read /. and turn on IM. We keep our cell phones on, and answer the phone when it rings. The personal and impersonal media streams coming at us have increased dramatically, but our inability to manage them effectively is our own damn fault.
"I don't know half of you half as well as I should like, and I like less than half of you half as well as you deserve."
I generally do one thing at a time, do it as well as I can, and finish it -- then handle all the little things that piled up, then move on to the next thing. It does mean that it might be a couple of days until I answer your email, but I get things accomplished, and deliver working software on a regular basis. Continually thrashing around, switching from one task to another, is a very unproductive way to work -- at least for me -- I find getting "into the zone" takes at least 1/2 an hour. And sometimes doesn't really start flowing until one or two hours of really carefully contemplating the problem at hand. But different people have different styles of working -- a good manager will figure out what works for who and do his best to make sure each has an environment that is productive for that individual.
Ian Ameline
Could you imagine installing linux via punch cards? Screw that.
Technology has been a part of sea changes to business, work, and life - no doubt. However, I'm not sure that technology has been the cause of these changes. I believe that technology is woven into the evolution of business and work, yes, but I don't think it is everything. Perception, it seems, is everything.
During my father's lifetime (and before), even big cities "shut down" at a given time of night. Further explained, stores (other than bars and such) closed after dinner time (and on most of Saturday and all of Sunday), services were not available after a certain time of the afternoon, people went home after work and did home stuff. Society spent more time in non-work mode.
Technology (going back to the steam engine, maybe before) gave us processes that could stretch around the clock. Technology gives us means to access information, human (non face-to-face) interaction, entertainment, and even shopping, all day long and through the night. Technology didn't make us 24-hour-per-day people, it allowed us to be as such.
I don't think technology is heading us to downfall - I think it is one of many pieces of our life-evolution.
A Passionate Independent Musician
Phone rings -- "yes, hello? .. no.. sorry.. yes.. i understand.. no i can't help you with that right now... ok.. i promise i'll look at it in a second."
[back to task]
Instant message -- "Dude!!! HRPROD22-NA01 is down, WTF?"
"I know, I know, but I'm working on something else right now, it's next in the queue, i promise you."
Look. I don't mean to be harsh, but either the person in charge of the servers has to be more competant (as in making sure they stay up) or they need to hire more staff.
If the IT desks phone is ringing off the hook and people are emailing you that stuff is going down, then either you need a better IT Admins or you need more of them.
That or better vendors...
If those IM, email, and phone technologies weren't available, it is safe to say those people would get up from their desk and come to your door and tell you those things are down or they need help with something. If they can't do their job, I'm pretty sure they are going to find some way of contacting you to try to find out why you aren't doing yours.
The fact, they could spend 60 or less seconds to do this instead of the 5 minutes required to go down to IT and back to their desk means more productivity for the company (which means the less chance they'll go out of business and you get to keep you server admin job).
Distraction is part of the 21st century corporate job.
"I am the king of the Romans, and am superior to rules of grammar!"
-Sigismund, Holy Roman Emperor (1368-1437)
BORING!
I couldn't disagree more. Where I work technology is a godsend. But the point that has to be looked that most people have noted in their points is that we already have a core process down that encourages productivity and nothing else. I manage half a ware house and half the daily inventory being done there, but usually I get an email a day if that. Every advance in technology we see is just a refinement of what we've already decided upon, better database, better equipment, better facilities, better partners who becasue of new technology can be more flexible with what they need from us, and you can see in our production figures that these new additions really do increase our productivity and efficiency. The problem with everyone complaining about being overwhelmed with IMs and emails and special offers of all kinds isn't that technology exists, but that it's not being used in the work place for any meaningful purpose.
Hell yes, we accomplish a lot less now. It took about 10 minutes for my wife to start selling some home made jewelery to millions of customers all around the world 24/7. She sold over 2000$ of good over christmas. Obviously we won't get rich with this and we'll most likely not create a real brand out of it. But I can tell you something: if it was taking less than 10 minutes to setup a shop 20 or 10 or even 5 years ago, everybody would know it by now. Now go back to work and stop smoking your carpet.
"Technology has sped everything up and, by speeding everything up, it's slowed everything down".
WTF does that mean?
Technology is now the world's whipping boy. If you're unproductive at work - technology's fault. If your industry starts losing money - technology's fault. Kid gets molested by some sicko they met on the internet - technology's fault. My god people, WAKE THE F*CK UP!
I agree with the parent. It seems like there is some bigger issue if you have 2 (I'm assuming from the gp post) production critical issues at the same time. I'd also add that technology gives you another benefit here. You know HRPROD22-NA01 is down? Then send an email out to some list that includes all the people this has an effect on. They'll all know immediately that there's a problem and you're working on it without each person wasting their time and your time telling you about it.
... otherwise the expectations will be increased.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
And don't even get me started on this USB backhoe.
This is total rubbish, why do people allways blame everything on the wrong things? This on tech, Violence on Video Games, etc... It's stupid.
-- Lattyware (www.lattyware.co.uk)
from TFA
"Workers completed two-thirds of their work in an average day last year, down from about three-quarters in a 1994 study, according to research conducted for Day-Timers"
if 2/3 was done on 1 day then when was the rest 1/3 was done... was it offshored... did the projects are getting more delayed by 33%... or is it technology which is doing the rest 33%...
seriously tough, i just don't know what make them come up with this statistics..
everyone downmodding this post will be prosecuted for reading my post without first buying a license!!!
So the average soldier can carry about 100lbs on an ongoing basis. Once, many moons ago, the rifle, ammo, water, and a change of underwear added up to about that ammount. Then some egghead came up with plastics, nylon, and composite materials, and all of a sudden the same ammount of kit ended up weighing 80 lbs instead. So what happened? Well....someone somewhere said "wait a minute...the average soldier CAN carry 100lbs on an ongoing basis....". So on to his kit pile they threw a collapsable shovel, a high-speed whistle, two changes of underwear, and whatever else they could add to get up to the 100lb mark. Ofcourse, the proccess has been repeating itself over the centuries, with the result that today the average soldier has more items (and as a result, mpre pockets) than he knows what to do with, and ends up looking something like a gypsy caravan. Yet despite all the improvements in technology, the extra gizmos, the new training, etc, he's carrying the same weight, and still doing largely the same job. Moral of the story? Whatever sort of technology we come up with, we're going to keep pushing ourselves to OUR limit. The technology isn't there to make things easier, and in most cases it actually makes things more complex; it exists only to boost productivity and effectivness.
I wrote my dissertation on this topic and it is tough to generalize to all technologies. For arguements sake, lets say that technology enables three capabilities: it lets you process more data faster (think spreadsheets), lets you store and retrieve more information (think databases), and it lowers communication costs (think networks). The short version is that the communication costs are what kills productivity. If you make it easier to communicate or gather information, people tend to not be thoughtful about the questions they ask or the information they currently hava available.
For those interested, here is a link to the original research.
The funny thing is, I wasted about ten minutes unsuccessfully attempting to access this article.
Think back many years to what the typical office job was in the 50s, 60s and even 70s. If you were in management, you wined and dined clients/vendors, and basically conventrated on your management job. There was an entire clerical staff to type your (paper, sent-by-regular-mail) memos, answer your phone calls and act as your gatekeeper. Computer generated reports (when they existed) came to you on green-bar paper for you to read at your leisure. It was expected that things took a lot longer to get done.
If you were on the non-management side, your job was very well defined. Secretaries typed, took memos, made coffee and answered the phone. Report-crunchers crunched reports and handed their results to the typing pool to be typed up. Those who ran the "IT department" were the scary guys in the basement data center caring for and feeding the magic box that spits out invoices and paychecks.
Flash forward to now. Everyone has and answers their own e-mail. Everyone has a BlackBerry and/or cellphone. Responses to reports and e-mails are expected in hours, not days. People are expected to be available 24 hours a day in some cases. Smarter workplaces know when you let you unplug, but they're hard to find, especially in IT. IT has it even worse, because they have to keep this whole show running for the 24/7 workaholic crowd.
These days, you're also expected to do your own work without assistance. You have to answer your phone, keep up with correspondence, analyze reports without the help of anyone else, and basically do way more jobs than the one you were hired for. I can see why it causes a lot of stress and why productivity suffers.
A really good example of what's happened is the very large insurance company I used to work for several years ago. They've been around forever and have two huge blocks in Manattan of office space. They had about 2000 people in that office space (very centralized company.) A guy I was working with who's been there since the early 70s told me that there were over 15,000 people in that same space, doing all the manual paperwork and other stuff. It's the ultimate "doing more with less" example.
I think this affects more than work...my whole life recently seems like there is never enough time for whatever it is i want to be doing at any given moment. Sure some of it is trivial, but its still noticable to me. For example, I love absorbing media. Be it for knowledge or entertainment. Between podcasts, music, the Stern Show and other sat radio shows, downloaded TV shows, movies, reading web pages at work, on my Treo, at home...i feel like i could quit my job and do nothing but soak up all this stuff 24/7. I have even started downloading books and magazines to my treo...sometimes books on tape. Im addicted. I cant ever get enough. Its insane how much info & entertainment is out there. Its no wonder i am less productive.
Don't ya hate it when the correct spelling of your favorite screen name is taken?
Tom DeMarco has a nice book about this called Slack.
By being busy we fool ourselves into thinking that we are being more efficient.
...richie - It is a good day to code.
I think the server issue was just an example that could be substituted for any situation where someone in the company needs our expertise on something. And of course problems close to them seem bigger than any others.
I think the "need to hire more staff" observation is the more likely (and realistic) one. I've been short staffed in my department for going on 4 years now and quite honestly i'm getting fed up with it. Combine that with theever growing perception that technical staff should be increasingly more available and you have the distraction and interruption nightmare.
One of the ways we try to combat the distraction effect is to make developers "unavailable" during certain hours of the day, but being short-staffed like we are it's only a matter of time until someone's hair is on fire and you have to go help out.
You might claim that we are not a well-run company. I won't argue that matter.
No sig for you!
Just think of the legions of typists that companies used to employ, just to send bills to customers. Each one had to be typed by hand, and more importantly, if you made a mistake, you started over from the beginning.
Just think of the legions of accountants and bookkeepers that companies used to need, but have replaced with spreadsheets. And nevermind the billing...
Just think of all the people that used to be hired as clerks to file and retrieve paperwork, but have been replaced by databases and search functions.
Just think of all the outstandingly mundane tasks that you would have to do if it weren't for a computer doing the job for you. Those jobs used to be filled by people. Those people have since moved on to other vocations. Perhaps this makes companies more efficient, but it also makes jobs harder to find.
"No problem. I have the capacity to do infinite work so long as you don't mind that my quality approaches zero."-Dilbert
Technology gives me communicaton for me due to my speech and hearing impediments. I don't think I would do well without IM, online chat, forums, etc.
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
Out of close to 300 million people, is a pool of one thousand in such a general survey even worth looking at? How can this provide remotely relevant data, even of impressions of productivity?
It is good to know that my efforts will be appreciated in about 200 years.
It is by the juice of the coffee bean that thoughts acquire speed, the teeth acquire stains. The stains become a warning
Actually, lots of people push back. Then they find their employment-at-will asses are out on the street looking for a new job -- but they may not find one any time soon, because there are lots *more* people willing to whore themselves to the corporation than to stand up for themselves and their co-workers.
Just one example of people standing up: I was working for a global ISP and got a lateral promotion from the NOC into SysAdmin. After a couple years in sysadmin I was pushing to get a market salary which I'd been denied upon the "promotion" due to lack of experience-on-paper. After much fighting I was denied a reasonable increase in my salary.
Well, I fought back, and in a way that got every one in my department a raise to bring the entire group up to market salary. Two weeks later I was also fired.
In my case it was a good thing, because I ten proceeded to double my salary by finding a job with a consulting firm, but not everyone gets so lucky.
Be who you are and say what you feel, because those who mind don't matter and those who matter don't mind. - Dr. Seuss
What's the most bitter enemy of concentration in an office?
What destroys focus with an effectiveness that inspired a Dilbert cartoon(*)?
What is so dangerous to time management that "important" people hire layers of assistants to protect themselves against it?
Straight from the nineteenth century, it's that piece of Victorian "technology", the telephone.
(*)"This is your anti-productivity pod. It's equipped with a small device that rings every time you try to concentrate."
IM is far better from a productivity point of view. You can set your status to "busy" or "do not disturb". You can set rules about who gets to contact you. IM doesn't announce itself with a sound like a fire alarm. A sound which is repeated five seconds later. And again. And again, because the person's not at his/her desk.
Yourdon's top project management suggestion for software development efforts was to disable the ringers in the phones.
The ADD/ADHD mind is taking over the world. Kneel before your overlords!
Hold on. I gotta take this call.
I need to respond to this email.
Check out my binary clock!
Let me check my calendar.
Ack! My pager just went off.
Darnit! The bulb on my USB lava lamp went out!
Spork.
P.S. Spork.
In other news...People have very short memories. We are WAY more productive with tech. We are also safer. At my job, I wrote a training tracking and notification system. Prior to the system being designed, company policy was that each employee in a department needed to be trained on all safety equipment propor to working with that equipment. They also were required to retrain on a specific on going basis. This required so much work to keep track of that it simply was not done. Then to audit the job would have taken 3 or 4 extra people to just do the audits.
Tech made it so that the effort to keep track of who you need to train consists of opening your email in the morning. Now, many think they are getting less done, because now they actually have to do the training, where as in the past, they would just 'misplace' their paperwork so they didn't have to do the work, and since it was so much work to audit these people, that never got done either. The audit now only requries the responsible person to open their email, and see if there is a notificaton.
Once the system was in place people quickly forgot how much effort the old system was to actually do. This is a steel mill, and when people don't perform their jobs safely, people can die. So, this does mean that the on site paramedics are less productive if you measure their productivity by the number of trips to the morgue they make.
We can also look at the productivity of the actual laborers in the mill. The amount of materials they make and move every year would be comparable to the pyramids. There are several hundred of them, but it is tech (thats right. A crane is tech) that allows them to do in a year with a few hundred men, what the pyramid builders needed thousands, and decades to accomplish.
I wonder how true this would be for, say, Slashdot users as a whole as opposed to the workforce as a whole. With a few glaring exceptions (usually involving phones), technology has enabled me to prioritize work like never before. E-mail keeps a useful paper trail for tracking ongoing issues (this has saved a hell of a lot of time I'd spend taking and organizing notes). Databases and internal webs ensure that I don't have to take 10 minues slogging through piles of paper and filing cabinets to find things I need. IM and VPNs has made working remotely a breeze. My team is spread across 4 locations, and we probably work more smoothly this way than we would if we were in a noisy office.
We can take care of emergencies from home without having to drive into the office via our VPN. We can prioritize dealing with people in ways not possible when people are physically walking up to your desk when you've got ten billion things in your head you have to get down into a document. If an emergency arises, the boss can call you on your analog telephone, and have you come into the office.
Or he can page you, and have you log on from home via VPN or what have you, and fix it from there.
Which would you prefer? I refuse to believe that before there was technology, there weren't emergencies, out of hours calls, and a lot of weekend work.
I've seen articles like this before. Technology is like drugs - do your tech; just don't let it do you.
Do I work a little more out of hours? Yes. I do. From home, in my jammies. Rocking. Ripped to the tits on french-pressed triple-strength gourmet coffee that would make Poseidon weep. Like no one's business. Not only do I get work done quickly and easily on weekends or at night when I have to, I get to look horrible doing it, unshaven and in my shorts and stained t-shirt, as I generally am when at home.
If my boss is on the road, and I have a quick question, I can IM it to his cell phone and let him get to it as soon as it convenient for him. I don't have to get held up for hours or days, creating longer hours for me down the road.
Yeah, everyone likes their silence. But I'll take an occasional weekend or after hours call as opposed to last minute rushes and work frenzies because someone was unreachable for hours on end and delayed the implementaion of something. For me personally, it's been worthwhile. I'm just speaking for myself, but I can't be the only one in this boat.
People have to learn to adapt to technology, ascertain its usefulness, learn how to *configure* it for better productivity, and not latch onto something because it's a fad and "everyone has one," within the constraints of what their employer requires.
I would never, ever, want to go back to the pre-1990 workplace, personally. Maybe I'm in the minority, but I spend less time on the road, less time organizing my desk, less time trying to track down data, and less time dealing with bullshit overall than I would without my tech.
I also spend less time in the office, and, almost paradoxically, getting a lot more work done in a shorter time.
A study some years later showed that the people who used the financial planner the most had the worst financial performance! We figured it was because it was taking up the time they should be spending on all the other kinds of planning, not to mention the rest of their work.
--dave
davecb@spamcop.net
Actually, I suspect this phenomenon is real. It's not hard to see that craftmanship is a dying art. However, I'd be more likely to blame it on economics and the continual corporate drive towards more for less.
I think this is a matter of the individual "not seeing the forest for the trees", as the trite little saying goes. From my own subjective point-of-view working around a bunch of salesmen, I have a number of veteran salesmen who feel they were better off with a paper-based Customer follow-up system. This is actually true for some as they had been doing it for decades and had fine tuned their paper system to a exact science. What this doesn't take into account is the time it takes to train a new employee to do the same, especially with the rate at which salesmen are hired and fired. The employer also sees a benefit from being able to better monitor what is going on and having more control over customer contacts. The tin-foil-hat types can scream 1984 if they like, but this is important to a business for knowing where to best apply its efforts and resources. Its all a matter of perspective, so one has to look at the whole thing. My two cents.
"Build something idiot proof, and someone will build a better idiot" - Samuel Clemens
add to it
and you get a measure of the productivity decrease contributed directly by Microsoft.
Hmm, seems like we ought to have a class-action suit here somewhere.
The effect of this one act has been dramatic. My productivity has dropped by 75% in the last 3 years.
I used to:
develop a rough tech document.
estimate hours.
develop code.
test code.
install code.
do any emergency fixes for problems that turn up in production since none of our testing environments match production.
emergency fix code.
install code.
Now I:
propose the project or recieve request for project from business analysts
create "swag" hours estimate for project.
fill out a form for pmo
wait for 2-3 weeks. If I have no work in the meantime, I just sit, train, daydream (just don't play games), write the next great american novel, hmmm browse slashdot.
get authorization to start project.
create formal user requirement documents (No I could not prepare them earlier without getting in trouble- the work can't be done -under penalty- before the project is approved.
create formal technical documents
create formal estimate of time to complete program.
fill out a form. submit it to pmo.
wait for pmo to approve project. Work on something else in the mean time or repeat above activities.
receive formal approval.
start coding.
hold weekly progress meetings.
produce regular status reports detailing what I've completed, estimate how much I have to go. Update the hours estimate up or down so the project plan can be adjusted.
test code.
schedule a meeting to install to production
formally test code and produce a formal test results document.
have meeting to install to production.
install to formal testing department computers.
wait for a month.
formal testing department says code is good.
wait for a week to a month until the next formal install window.
install code.
do any emergency fixes for problems that turn up in production since none of our testing environments match production.
emergency fix code.
install code.
elapsed time for a 20 to 40 hour project is now about 320 hours. In only 3 years. To be fair, we are beginning to get our hands around the lag times and schedule work into them so we are probably going to reduce this to about 240 hours for a 20 to 40 hour project.
Insane? YES.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
10 years ago if I had a small issue that needed addressed I would talk to one of my coworkers or my boss in the hall or the lab. Now I tend to send and email. That email will often get sent to other people who will reply and ask for followups. That often includes diagrams and pictures and graphs. Before you know it I have to put a powerpoint together and it has to be clear and attractive because if it gets to upper management that is how they want it.
Now I am not saying this is bad. I do believe that problems get resolved faster, dead end ideas are cut off quicker, and as a team we get more work done in a given amount of time. It is just that I rate my productivity on the progress I do in the lab. When I have 3 or 4 projects and spend 6 to 10 hours a week just emailing or making slides for them my lab productivity is obviously effected. That is where I want to spend my time.
Luckily my managers are well aware of this and include the administrative/communicaton work when evaluating my performance but I do feel less productive.
I have secretly hidden some mispelled words in this post. Can you find them?
It has real significance. Because if you think you're doing more and accomplishing less, willingness to do more and better dimisnhes. I think it is propably difficult or maybe even impossible determine are peopel working more. Infact it can be irrelevant I'd claim.
Infact I'm not sure has the amount of work any signficance at all. All people who are at work, propably know demand for work never ends. I think the diffrence is have people anykind of idea have they moved forward in it. Or accomplished some temporary goal definetely.
What IT has caused. Is that lot of work is thrown to workers all at same time in a random order. It causes people to have unnessary stress, as they can't figure out how much they've done and have they accomplished anything. People are always reacting and doing something nowdays.
The amount of work [b]needed[/b] can be even same as before. But if you shred a building manual of some device to small pieces chapter by chapter, post it to the builder in random order in randomg intervals. You can bet the builder feels he has more work, than if he'd been given the parts in logical order, in easily anticipated order.
He may actually use same time to build as the person that has all of the manual arriving in a correct order. Problem is that he has to worry more about did he understood correctly the parts his already has. And also any new part that arrives may cause him to change his plan or he may even have to wait some of them to arrive. And when a three parts arrive at same time and there is a time limit, he has to work suddenly three times as hard.
The added uncertainity, the unpredictable work flow and the monents wasted to sheer waiting, do make people feel they work more. Lot of what I descripe above, can be seen being 'normal' in rapidly changing modern worl.
Nobody knows the trouble I've seen, nobody knows has the trouble seen me, even I sometimes wonder why I write these line
At least where I work. The systems put in place get in the way more than help. The culture around here is that software will define our process. That's a very wrong way to think. You should define process, and get software that helps make that process more efficient.
It would be nice if we could measure the FACTS instead of what people think. Asking people if they think they are more productive might be misleading, because as the article points out, technology makes you feel like you're doing less by allowing you to move quickly between projects. But how to really measure this? It's a manager's nightmare.
Currently hooked on AMP
workers, I guess. Sounds like you could bump up average productivity by hunting all of us down and killing us.
yield goofy headlines about the study.
every other measure says productivity has increased in the last decade as the long promised leverage of computing for knowledge workers finally kicked in.
What skews this study is the fact that a side effect of all the automation is to distance and abstract the products from the people...nobody has the job satisfaction they used to have in the "good old days" when they were more "hands on" and "face to face" in doing their work. But that is really not the same as productivity.
I think less gets done because people realize that computers make work go faster. So they think they have more time during the day to e-mail friends, gossip, take a million bathroom/coffee breaks and lose track of time so when the deadline hits, they have little to nothing done and they blame it on technology.
Click Click Bloody Click PANCAKES!
Honestly this is ridiculous...
I keep a legal pad next to my desk.. It lists all of my projects. As I complete them I cross them off the list.
Every day I come into work I write a new list first thing. On that list are the tasks I hope to either complete or work on in the day. As you complete the tasks you check them off of this and the aforefementioned list. To the left of the tasks I write priority numbers. Which tasks are the most important for me to complete today. If for some reason a task doesn't fit this mold, you're not writing your tasks appropriately. Don't write "program more on X and Y app.." as a task. Write "Analyze X Bug", "Develop X part of Y feature". What you DON'T want to do is get to a task and say to yourself, "*sigh*... now how do I go about starting this?" Make it clear and easy to conceptualize. When writing the list actually figure out and name the next real step... THEN write the task on your list.
Start plugging away at your prioritized list. If anyone presents you with new tasks, feel free to add them to the list. Then consider their prioritization and reprioritize he list if you need to. You should be working on the highest priority task at any given time. It's perfectly acceptable to put short term tasks high in priority simply because they need to be done Today and can be completed somewhat quickly.
It's your job as a sentient employee to determine what you can and can't get done in an day. Assuming you're not just a voiceless work horse.
You may be inundated with a million small tasks coming at you at once, but it's YOUR job to be productive. If you can't be productive with the way your coworkers interact with you... do something about it. Start at ticket system and standardize procedures for interacting with you. Your coworkers understand that you can only do so much in the day (and if they don't, it's your fault). Express you problems with management and suggest realistic methods of resolving them. Management can be slow to adopt change, which is why you have to clearly represent the advantages.
YOU are responsible for being productive, and it comes down to YOUR algorithms. Do not blame the technology and do not blame your coworkers. Work is challenging.. if it wasn't you wouldn't need to be there. If you are absolutely forbidden from making your work environment more suitable for productivity well.... I don't know, I've just never seen that situation.
People have been ineffective at their work since people existed.. It's to be expected. Learn how to deal with it or continue your old trend. Just don't blame the technology.
People just expect to waltz into their work and sit down and do some repetitive mindless work (because that's the easiest kind of work to get in the habit of doing). I just perceive it as laziness.
Back it the olden days, it was good to go home and feel like you had accomplished all the day's work you set out to do.
Now, it's a sign you are a slacker who didn't tale on enough work in the first place.
Values have changed, and the appearance of frantic activity is much better for your career than the actual amount and quality of work you get done, and you get rewarded for it regardless of whether someone else has to clean up the half-assed mess you made.
Give a man a fish and you have fed him for today. Teach a man to fish, and he'll say "WHERE'S MY FISH, YOU IDIOT?"
Those jobs are gone. An individual manageer may not feel quite as productive without his/her secretary, but if he's doing his job and hers, productivity has still roughly doubled (twice the number of jobs done per unit time).
Part of this is just a shift in business culture: people in business no longer care so much about spelling or grammar, so having a professional typist to re-word a manager's personal communications to look and sound "just right" has become a luxury few can now afford.
Secretaries used to be half of the executive team. Now, the job gets done, largely without them.
Yes, and then you've also cost the other 127 people in the organization who couldn't care less about HRPROD22-NA01 at least 30 seconds to read and discard the email, plus the lost time for task switching between what they were doing and reading your email. This equates to 2 hours of lost time with one press of the send-button.
One thing that technology has made very easy is for a single person to annoy a very large group of people with minimal effort. And that person does not even have to be out to annoy them, merely stupidity suffices. In fact, technology has not only increased the power of the competent to do good, it has also multiplied the power of the evil or incompetent to do bad (SPAM anyone?).
An entire /. discussion about how adding technology to our lives has reduced our productivity? Throw me a bone!
9 9.063 8.065 9.065 2.199 2.328 27.793 24.693 94.502 78.35
/.,) , the overall population is producing almost 50% more goods and services with a workforce that is barely 10% larger. Now that's what any reasonable person would agree is a productivity INCREASE.
Greenspan is retired mere nanoseconds before we ignore the facts all around us?
Consider the following chart:
Year____US GDP________________Workers________GDP per Worker
1996____7,816,820,000,000____119,708,000____$65,2
1997____8,304,330,000,000____122,776,000____$67,6
1998____8,746,980,000,000____125,930,000____$69,4
1999____9,268,430,000,000____128,993,000____$71,8
2000____9,816,970,000,000____131,785,000____$74,4
2001____10,127,900,000,000____131,826,000____$76,
2002____10,469,600,000,000____130,341,000____$80,
2003____10,971,200,000,000____129,999,000____$84,
2004____11,734,300,000,000____131,435,000____$89,
In less than 10 years of intensive deployment of desktop, laptop, handheld, and communications technologies, annual US output increased from $65,299.06 to $89,278.35 per year. (Don't confuse that with personal income. This number is the total income for both all business corporations and sole proprietorships in the country.)
The bottom line: while you may personally FEEL like you are being pulled in too many directions and getting less done, (and for all I know, you personally MAY be spending 7.7 hours a day on
Even adjusted for inflation, the numbers are still way..way..way..UP.
If my numbers are off, I am open to correction and explanations.
Until then, quitcherwhining..
Live Long and Prosper - Thanks Leonard. You are missed.
Or maybe the people who took this stupid survery are not getting as much work done because they're busy filling out stupid surveys about how much work they're not getting done.
Earlier generations of machines decreased the complexity of tasks.
In contrast, information technologies can increase the intellectual
content of work at all levels. (Shoshana Zuboff)
I had ordered a couple of parts from a tractor dealer two counties over. They don't ship to the door so I had to drive over to pick them up. when I got there, one of the two was incorrect, so we had to look again.. I went with the parts dude to look at the computer. First he went through his dead trees catalog, couldn't find it,but he was comfortable enough there. Then we hit the screen. OMGBBQWTF was that ugly crap! Just NASTY looking, looked like someones first attempt at coding or something. It was a propietary looking sheet that ran on top of IE. It was the worst junk I have ever seen, totally bogus, just complicated beyond belief and all squished together and you couldn't really see anything there. And dig this...NO ONE had ever shown this parts guy that you could have two windows open, one within the other one like in frames, and that if there were scroll bars that BOTH of them scrolled. We were looking at a page where he had to scroll an inner bar down to keep looking at the parts. He scrolls the outside one, then stops "that's it" he says" "no more parts".
I had to SHOW him to scroll the inner one, he goes "wow!"
No telling how many lost sales and frustrated customers who couldn't get what they wanted, and this is a factory dealer place.
We had pitiful so called "technology" being run by someone with zero training. Bad mojo. In this instance just the plain old fashioned catalogs, if they would have been more complete, would have been much better.
technology increasing causes expectations to increase; giving the impression less is accomplished.
What is slashdot?
Or the fact we overhired during the 1990's and have been laying off, firing, and outsourcing people to increase productivity?
Well now we have no secretaries helping out and we do the work of mroe than one person to make our shareholders happy.
Its natural and unrelated to technology. Since the economy is improving and adding jobs just wait until we see huge productivity improvements as companies have bigger budgets to hire more people so they can focus on 1 task rather than several jobs at once.
http://saveie6.com/
....well I would like to see these people try and live with the large amount of transactions that we make every day because of both the growing population level and the growing middle class represented world wide. I would also like to see a government that would be able to handle a population this size without it. I would also like to see a nation that is ran freely and with as transparent a government as we now have (thanks to blogs etc...) without it.
***please add to the list as I would love to see how many things we can find that would be impossible to do without the technology that we have today***
We seldom regret saying too little but often regret saying too much.
Where I work, the main mode of communication is phone (largely teleconference, with 4-12 people on the call, in which case it's impossible to document exactly whom said what, especially as two of them are likely to be in a car, with a noisy connection, and the list of parties not available to all parties on the call), or random email (which goes to some people, but not others), or personal conversations, which are only related well after the event, and after we have done a lot of design work without that knowledge. My latest situation is that they have allocated 5 (of four available!) CPU boards to a certain project; I had pointed out that you could use the 4 available to build 3 domains, and add the other one later. They've ignored that, and have no CPUs left for the additional domain. Their choice == their problem? Not by their standards. Apparently, it's my problem. So, we chucked out our original design beause they wanted these 3 first, and came up with a new design. They have now created a new situation whereby all 4 CPU boards are used in 2 domains, and there is nothing left to build the 3rd domain. (We've got another 10 domains to build, FFS!). This is after we've come down hard on them, saying that there has to be strict version control on the project plan, because we (hey, what the hell, it's just a personal choice - LIKE TO DO THINGS PROFESSIONALLY.) So they're now screwed again, because they still can't provide what they promised someone (who? they won't say - there are so many layers involved in this project) and that is suddenly my problem again (so they claim). It's not technology making my work harder, it's lack of change control. Sane people coming up with a plan, ensuring that everybody can sign up to that plan, and then implementing it, would take away 90% of the stress. I can then spend my other stress time on the test environments (after all, it should all be tested in the test env's, then done as clockwork in the Live, after all???!!!!!)
... I am shocked, shocked at that thought! I mean doesn't everyone spend at least 25% of there time delivering code, fixing broken merges, comparing machine configurations, and deciphering ambiguous error messages?
Productivity is the product (measured in dollars) per unit labor. Timeliness, coordination, and efficiency all increase the value of what you do, even if it seems like you spend all day reading stupid reports, taking stupid phone calls, and wasting effort being distracted.
Doing the valuable project and being distracted from the invaluable project means you're being more productive - even if you wasted some effort on the low-value project.
The fact that you:
- got the information you needed, at the right moment, and
- helped other members of your team from being stuck all day doing the wrong thing,
- just so you could get that rush report to the boss so he could make an important decision by 5 o'clock,
- even though it ruined what you wanted to get done,
doesn't mean you weren't productive.
In fact, you:
- saved yourself from needing to do hours of research
- prevented your coworkers from wasting dozens more hours
- sped up the company strategy by a day
- all for the mere cost of something that can be done tomorrow.
That, my friends, is the high stress world of increased productivity.
http://www.accountkiller.com/removal-requested
The only people who are slowing down because of technology are those that are too lazy or can't focus on work and they just needed a good excuse not to do it. My father works at a hospital in the region and says that a quarer of the techs in his lab spend half the day on the www looking at auction sites, tutorials etc instead of doing work that piles up. Just last week they fired someone who was faking test results(in a hospital!) SO it's the lazy and people without respect for their work that slow down, the rest of us speed up cause now we are more efficient(usually).
Even if it wsn't people FEELING like they were getting less accomplished, the bottom line is just because people are getting less ccomplished, doesn't mean they are working harder to accomplish the same tasks. Chores are fractionally as difficult as they were decades ago, it's mind numbing how much easier it has become to be productive. Just look at GDP growth, and noone can make an argument we are less productive.
Any fool can criticise, condemn, and complain, and most fools do. - Benjamin Franklin
Although many believe the article to be false, I can see that Groupware (Exchange, Kroupware, GroupWise, etc.) makes it way too easy for people to over-invite meetings. I have seen this alone to contribute to hundreds of lost man-hours in a year. Validating that I do seem to accomplish less being dragged into unorganized meetings.