The Schedule
Surfing the Internet is a timesink. We all know this. Below are estimates, reasonably accurate I hope, of my daily activities and the time they take. This represents an average workday.
- Reading personal email – 30 mins
- Writing personal email – 30 mins
- Reading work email – 45 mins
- Writing work email – 15 mins
- Reading news/blogs – 1 hr
- Blogging – 30 mins
- IMing – 30 mins
- Working – 3 hrs
- Eating – 1 hr
This 8-hour workday is filled with activities centered around a few tools, including email, blogs, instant messengers, working, and eating. I also pee, but that usually takes less that 10 minutes per day, so I don’t count it here.
Notice that only three hours, or 37.5 percent, are spent working. That’s a little over a third of my day. Now, I suppose I need to qualify this by saying that I have been doing what I do for almost a decade and that I generally work at warp speed, meaning that I probably do more in three hours than some in my field do in six. But while bragging is fun, it is no consolation to my employer, who is paying me for eight hours of work.
However, to be fair, no one expects anyone to work eight hours a day. In fact, it appears from the US Department of Labor’s numbers that I spend an average amount of time working each day. If these numbers mean anything, they seem to suggest that work time remained stable from 2003 to 2006. According to this report, we actually spent more time working in 2006 than we did in 2003.
The Problem
The reason I break down the times of my daily workday activities is because I have this nagging and ever growing feeling that I am simply not getting enough done. I have felt like this all of my life, truth be told, but I really feel like a slacker these days.
I suspect that much of the problem stems from having too many choices. Or, rather, I have not fully adjusted to making decisions given the choices I have today. Granted that I am not a supercentenarian, there does seem to be many more choices for the wired worker of today than yesterday. For instance, a decade ago, email wasn’t ubiquitous and instant messaging wasn’t even in the picture. Workers in 1997 probably wasted most of their workdays on Solitaire and Pong.
Short of a catastrophe, our technological choices will not diminish. Web 2.0 has only just begun and it promises to offer at our feet far more interactive, real-time communication technologies than we currently have. So we need to learn to adapt to these technologies, to filter them out, and to effectively get on with our lives. I know I do.
Solutions another time.
Sphere: Related Content
Paul Otlet devoted his professional life to the art of collecting, recording, organizing and disseminating knowledge. Although he lived decades before computers and networks emerged, what he discussed prefigured what ultimately became the World Wide Web. His vision of a great network of knowledge was centered on documents and included the notions of hyperlinks, search engines, remote access, and social networks—although these notions were described by different names.