Interesting article on Yahoo News says most U.S. workers say they are getting less accomplished than a decade ago.
Workers completed two-thirds of their work in an average day last year, down from about three-quarters in a 1994 study
…
in 1994, 82 percent said they accomplished at least half their daily planned work but that number fell to 50 percent last year.
They claim the culprit is technology -
“Technology has sped everything up and, by speeding everything up, it’s slowed everything down, paradoxically,” said John Challenger, chief executive of Chicago-based outplacement consultants Challenger, Gray & Christmas Inc.“We never concentrate on one task anymore. You take a little chip out of it, and then you’re on to the next thing,” Challenger said on Wednesday. “It’s harder to feel like you’re accomplishing something.”
I certainly sympathize. However the reality is that US worker productivity has increased enormously in the last decade. If it’s true that people feel ineffective and attribute that to task fragmentation, it indicates that they are not managing the way they use technology well and that there are in fact even greater gains in productivity possible if they can lear to manage their time more effectively.
I find this interesting in light of the book I’m reading at the moment (intermittently, but I did make some progress this morning) “Working Smarter, Not Harder”.