Mastering Time Management in the Modern Workplace

1. When you come to the edge of all the light you know, and you are about to step off into the darkness of the unknown, faith is knowing that one of two things will happen: There will be something solid to stand on, or you will be taught how to fly. —Barbara J. Winter

2. The average employee spends 25% of the workday on email which is equivalent to 1 hour and 47 minutes. -CNN (2004)

3. Email has become the most common way of business communication and is growing at a rate of 66% annually. - Policy Institute (2004)

4. In her book, Survive Information Overload, Kathryn Alesandrini cites research showing the average executive wastes 45 minutes a day searching for something lost on his or her desk.

5. The average worker has 36 hours of work stacked on their desk and 90 minutes in which to do it.

6. 80% of what we keep we never use. -Barbara Hemphill (Agency Sales Magazine, April 1, 2003)

7. More than one out of four Americans remark that they would like to be better organized.

8. People who multitask are less efficient than those who focus on one project at a time. Time lost switching among tasks increases with the complexity of the tasks. -Star-Telegram.com March 1, 2003

9. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention state unequivocally that 80% of our medical expenditures are now stress related. -Fast Company Magazine Feb. 2003

10. 23% of adults say they pay bills late (and incur fees) because they lose them. -Harris Interactive

11. 28% of message users say they feel more pressure to respond quickly to messages than they did 5 years ago. -Casio Phonemate Survey

12. Executives waste six weeks per year searching for lost documents. -Fast Company Magazine Aug. 2004

13. 68% of US executives polled from 1000 largest companies said they are working more hours today than 5 years ago. 27% report they log significantly more hours. -Office Pro, Feb. 2001

14. In a study of 138 business people, 73% said their impressions of colleagues were influenced by the way their desks are organized. Nearly 70% believed that workers with messy desks were perceived as less career-driven than their fastidious counterparts. -Arizona Republic, June 31, 2001

15. The document for a Boeing 747 weighs more than the plane itself. -Office Systems Magazine, March 1995

16. It costs $120 in labor to track down a misplaced document or $250 in labor to recreate it. -North Carolina’s Brunswick Beacon, Oct. 1, 1994

17. 2/3 of business managers surveyed reported tension with colleagues, loss of job satisfaction, and strained personal relationships as a result of information overload. -Data Smog, Page 31

18. A weekly edition of the New York Times contains more information than the average person was likely to come across in a lifetime during 17th Century England. -Saul Wurman, Information Anxiety

19. It takes a person 20-30 minutes to transition into deep, critical, and creative thought. The average American worker is interrupted 8 times an hour. Not only do they struggle to get into their creative zone, they lose productivity because they are repeating steps to retrace where they left off. -Jim Miller, GM, Extended Workplace Solutions for U.S. West

20. The average organization: Makes 19 copies of each document. Spends $20 in labor to file each document. Spends $120 in labor searching for each misfiled document. Loses one out of every 20 documents. Spends 25 hours recreating each lost document. -PricewaterhouseCoopers

21. On average, we experience one interruption every 8 minutes. The average interruption lasts approximately 5 minutes. In an 8-hour day, this rate of interruptions would total 50% of the workday. -Dr. Donald Wetmore

22. A national poll found that 96% of employees want more flexibility and control over their time. -Fast Company, Jan. 2004

23. 80% of what we file never gets looked at again. -Irene Seiberling, The Leader-Post, Regina, Saskatchewan, March 13, 2004

24. 42% of adults report that too often they feel that “life is a treadmill and I can’t get off.” -Franklin Covey

25. The damage caused to your time management by any given interruption is always twice as long as the duration of the interruption itself. -Ted Johns, Perfect Time Management

26. Record keeping constitutes more than 90% of all office activity. -North Carolina’s Brunswick Beacon, Oct. 1994

27. 2003 University of South Alabama study on the cost effectiveness of time management for low and mid-level managers in a corporate setting showed an 18% improvement in productivity following formal time management training.

28. Studies have shown that some executives will pick up a single piece of paper from their desk 30-40 times before acting on it. -Michael Woolery, Seize the Day

29. 80% of clutter in most homes is a result of disorganization, not lack of space. -Shelley Page Ottawa Citizen, Jan. 4, 2004

30. Getting rid of excess clutter would eliminate 40% of housework in the average home. -National Soap and Detergent Association

31. Workgroups lose 15% of all documents they're handling and filing, and spend 30% of their time trying to find lost documents. 7.5% of all documents get lost completely.

32. 75-90% of all visits to physicians are stress related. -NMHA, 1997

33. 90% of all documents handled each day are merely shuffled.

34. 80% of filed papers are never referenced again. 50% of all filed materials are duplicates or expired information.

35. Spending 10 to 15 minutes every morning mapping out your day can save up to 6 hours a week.

36. Americans as a whole waste more than nine million hours each day looking for lost and misplaced articles, amounting to a national loss of nearly $150 million per day.

37. An average interruption during the work day consumes ten to twenty minutes in getting back on track, not counting the actual time with the interrupter.

38. The typical businessperson experiences 170 interactions per day and has a backlog of 200-300 hours of uncompleted work.

39. A decision is only a hope until carrying it out has become somebody’s work assignment and responsibility, with a deadline. —Dr. Peter Drucker

40. The enemy often tries to make us attempt and start many projects so that we will be overwhelmed with too many tasks, and therefore achieve nothing and leave everything unfinished. Sometimes he even suggests the wish to undertake some excellent work that he foresees we will never accomplish. This is to distract us from the prosecution of some less excellent work that we would have easily completed. He does not care how many plans and beginnings we make, provided nothing is finished. —St. Francis de Sales

41. "There's not enough time in the day: Our enemy is time, and technology is the only way [to combat that]." -John Q. Porter Montgomery County's (Maryland) Assistant Superintendent Quoted in District Administration Magazine June 2006