More survey and study results about how human beings waste time or use it ineffectively (it's not always our fault, though!):
Email statistics and projections indicate that, by 2011, the average number of corporate emails sent and received per person each day will be 228 (up from 142 in 2007). The corresponding percent of work spent managing email for the average corporate email user will rise from 17% in 2003 to a projected 41% this year. (2007 study conducted by technology market research firm Radicati Group)
In 2009, about 81% of all email traffic is expected to be spam. Projections indicate that the typical 1000-user organization can spend as much as $1.8 million per year to manage spam (2009 study by the Radicati Group)
The average office has 19 copies of each document. (From an article in USA Today)
The average retrieval/refiling time for a paper document: 10 minutes. However, about 3% of documents are lost or misfiled, leading to a recovery rate of $120 per document. (Study by the Gartner Group, Coopers & Lybrand, Ernst & Young)
The average executive wastes 150 hours each year looking for misplaced documents. (2003 study by Office World News)
Misplacing items isn't confined to the office: Americans as a whole waste more than 9 million hours each day looking for lost/misplaced items. (Study by the American Demographic Society)
The average manager is interrupted every 8 minutes. As for the non-average, 50% are interrupted 8-9 times per hour; 22%,, 10-11 times; 11%, 6-7 times; 5%, 1-3 times; and 2% more than 12 times per hour! (Study conducted by Priority Management Systems)
The average amount of time executives spend in (mostly needless) meetings each week: 7.8 hours. (Survey by Accountemps)
The desk of the average white collar worker holds 36 hours of uncompleted work. That desk's occupant spends 3 hours per week sorting piles to find and organize the project/s being worked upon. (From The Overload Syndrome, by Richard Swenson)
Studies show that a certain percentage of executives pick up a single piece of paper on their desk from 30 to 40 times before deciding to take action upon it. (From Seize the Day, by Michael Woolery)
About 25% of workers save things in piles instead of files. (Paper presented by Global Market Research firm Taylor Nelson Sofres)
[…] issue many people face is time management, and one would inclined to believe that after reading Steven Gedon’s website. As demonstrated above, it is imperative to ensure our time management is kept in check in order to […]