Your working day is 67 minutes longer thanks to technology

Your technology is extending your workday by 67 minutes every day. (Killing time at work)

Over the course of a traditional working week that equates to 5.5 hours extra and over the course of the year that’s an extra 11 days of work…ELEVEN.

Wasn’t all this workplace technology supposed to save us time, create efficiencies and ultimately mean we could work smarter and less?

The average number of different applications a knowledge worker receives notifications from is 6.?

That feels like too many already. They’re also all different in the way that we use them. Slack isn’t the same as email and it’s different from Salesforce.

We're all looking for flexibility. That’s been consistent over the past few years.

And that isn’t just about where we work but when we work.

We had a golden chance to say goodbye to the rigid 9-5, but it appears we’re still stuck in old habits of presenteeism, and technology is making things worse.

And what's funny is we've seen this play out before. This exact scenario happened a few years back, we haven't learnt from it or joined the dots.

There was a trend a few years back at companies to have unlimited holiday days as a perk. This policy was initially heralded as progressive, but it turned pretty quickly.

The consensus is that when people have unlimited holiday days they take less. From stats that I found it becomes more like 20 days when the standard is usual 28 days off.

Unlimited means there's all this possibility... there's so much choice, that you never choose

I love Ben Gately’s, Charlie HR’s quote about this

“If you are given 25 days holiday that is yours to take, then you are subconsciously motivated to take them. It’s some kind of psychological quirk of ownership – when something belongs to you, then you immediately value it far more highly.

“Whereas the lack of a number – the very concept of unlimited – potentially meant you didn’t value that holiday time in the same way.”

We like the idea of true flexibility but it's important for companies to set some boundaries to ensure that we don’t value our time as much.

There are 2 examples I have seen from clients at Temporall that I wanted to share with you:

The 7-7 rule

This is when you mandate that work has to happen between the hours of 7 am - 7 pm. You can work within that time frame as you see fit. It eliminates the tendency to message late into the evening and having employees log on to respond to something that may not be urgent. Obviously, there will be cases when people work late into the evening, but they are told to schedule send unless critical. Crucially it allows you to go to the gym during the middle of the day, and structure your life around work and not the other way around.

The onboarding plan.

This is where new employees are asked to come to the office a few days a week for the first month of their employment. It allows them to meet face to face with colleagues from not only their own team but colleagues that they usually won’t have a working relationship. It’s about taking and building these early relationships to have a better grounding and connection as they ramp up.

On top of the 67 additional minutes added to the working day, 54% of knowledge workers feel pressure to show they are online at certain times of the day.

It feels like the social norms of the office still drive us and we’re finding it difficult to break away from them. We have utopian ideas of complete flexibility, and work whenever and wherever you want, but as the data show that isn’t quite working.

We need flexibility, but being intentional about that and making sure it’s something that is inclusive for all.

Lots of this will inevitably come from the top as I explained with the 7-7 rule and the onboarding plan. But it also has to come from you as an individual, and it will hopefully meet somewhere in the middle.

What works for me, is the great outdoors. Every day I have to get screen-free time in the form of a walk or outdoor exercise.

If I don't get that I find myself in a worst mental state and more drained at the end of the day.

That 30 to 60 minutes a day is what works for me, outside.

Working boundaries and norms will be built over the next couple of years, especially in how we use technology in organisations

We buy technology to drive more efficiency and time savings, but where did those 67 minutes come from?

We need to work smarter to unlock the promise that we should be working less, we should be more working more efficiently, and we should be all smarter.

What I can do today in a couple of hours, would have taken me a week in the 90s.

We, therefore, need to factor this into work.