American Workers “Waste” Two Hours a Day

The good people at AOL and salary.com have just issued a survey in which American workers confess to wasting 2 hours out of every working day. And that doesn’t include lunch. And it certainly doesn’t include ineffective and stupid tasks that over-paid managers decide are vital. The problem is the word “waste.” As Mark Twain said, “The difference between the right word and the almost right word is the difference between lightning and the lightning bug.” Thinking is not visible labor.

Waste is the enemy of efficiency. And as anyone who has an MBA, or even better, a shred of common sense, can attest, efficient operations maximize output by getting the most out of inputs. And maximum output in a business is the key to market share, profits and success. So, in brief, waste is bad.

But are these workers really wasting time? The kid comes home and calls to say everything is OK. For the parent/worker, that means the ability to focus on the job without the distractions of private life creeping in further. Exchanging gossip at the water cooler is a better and cheaper way to build a team than any expensive and disruptive off-site seminar. “Spacing out” on the back of the proverbial three-martini lunch is probably wasteful, but day dreaming is the key to creativity. Inspiration and imagination don’t happen on a set schedule, no matter how inefficient that is.

The survey team acknowledges this, and full marks to them for it. Bill Coleman, senior vice-president at salary.com, said a lot of managers view time spent not actually doing work as “creative waste.” As more and more labor hinges less and less on doing physical things, the business world is going to have to accommodate the flukes of the human mind to an ever greater degree.

In the end, measuring the value of a worker by time spent doing something is probably less accurate than ever before. On an assembly line, hours worked translates very easily into widgets produced. In debugging software, designing a building or writing a novel, time spent doesn’t equal value produced. Mr. Coleman summed it up, “Good managers know the work ethic of each of their employees and know who's a producer and who's a slacker.” Getting things done sometimes requires doing other things first.


© Copyright 2005 by The Kensington Review, J. Myhre, Editor. No part of this publication may be reproduced without written consent.
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