You have been staring blankly at your computer screen for about an hour. You have made coffee, gone to the bathroom, tried to study, but it just isn’t happening. Maybe you checked social media once or twice. Sound familiar? That’s normal human behavior, and the lack of productivity for most of the day is surprisingly common. If you feel like you often spend too much time doing too little work, idling or just wondering how to get started, pick your most productive hours to work. One thing is for certain, you won’t be productive for a majority of the day if you don’t plan out your day carefully.
The average American works 8.8 hours per day. Studies have shown we are not productive for many of those hours. One study done in the U.K. polled almost 2,000 workers who confessed all their time-wasting habits. They admitted, on average, to only feeling productive for two hours and 53 minutes out of the eight-hour workday. Respondents said the biggest culprits of time wasting were checking the news online at more than an hour per day, checking social media for more than 40 minutes and talking to coworkers about non-work-related things for another 40 minutes. We search for new jobs at our current jobs for nearly a half-hour each day. Still more time was eaten up by things like texting, making tea and coffee. While we may be distracted for only a few minutes at a time, those minutes add up quickly to hours.
Longer work hours are associated with decreased productivity. In fact, the eight-hour workday, reduced from between 10 and 16 hours which was standard since the Industrial Revolution, was instituted by Henry Ford in the 1920s precisely because it made workers more productive. Greece is the country with the longest work hours among developed countries, according to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), but hourly pay isn’t correspondingly lower with lower productivity. This, in combination with other factors, makes many Greek firms uncompetitive, per the OECD Observer.
Unproductive work hours, on a mass scale, cripple the economies of whole countries.
Chip Heath, a professor at Stanford Graduate School of Business along with his brother Dan, have written the most authoritative book on how to reign in your brain, called “Switch: How to Change Things When Change Is Hard.” They recommend we get our emotions under control before we try to execute logical tasks. The Heaths liken our brain to a lopsided system, a powerful elephant (our emotional brain) and its rider (our logical brain). Part of understanding productivity is understanding that the elephant can only be controlled for so long before it disobeys the rider. That’s why we have to choose to work during times when our emotions lend themselves to it. If you feel most productive and least distracted at 3 a.m., get most of your studying done then. Don’t try to study after a long day at work without a break or after an exhausting meeting.
It's normal to check Twitter at your desk. Remember, increasing your productivity is more about finding the bright spots when you can concentrate and defending those like your firstborn, than about swearing off social media.
Stephan Chamberlin is a UF political science junior. His column comes out Tuesday and Thursday.
