What percentage of your time at work are you actually working? 18

[Christine74]

I was just reading the "How many hours per week do you work?" thread and would like to ask all of you what percentage of those hours you spend at work are you actually *working* at your job, meaning that you're not chatting with your coworkers, or pretending to work when you're not, or posting to online message boards .

Personally, I'm probably only working productively for around two hours of each eight-hour shift, which works out to 25%. How about you?

Thanks,

-Christine

 

[RDK]

An 8 hour day has 480 minutes in it.

Say 2 formal coffee breaks at 20 minutes each.

Allow 15 minutes in the morning and after lunch to take off your jacket, engage in the normal interpersonal pleasantries with your co workers etc.

Allow another 10 minutes before lunch and at quitting time to allow for making lunch arrangements, tidying up and other tasks associated with leaving the building

Add in two washroom breaks at 10 minutes each and we get at least 40+30+20+20=110 lost productivity minutes or 23% of the available time.

Then you subtract time for dumb phone calls, useless meetings, office chit chat etc and you are lucky to be 60 to 70% productive in the course of a day.

Of course you can work longer or take coffee at your desk but the end result will be not much different.

Time spent at engineering work is not the best metric, output is the best one but very hard to quantify.

Rick Kitson MBA P.Eng

Construction Project Management
From conception to completion

http://www.kitsonengineering.com

 

[cadnutcase]

Psionsaint,

Where can I get one of those money clocks? I tried google, but didn't have much luck

 

[PsionSaint]

cadnutcase -

I had it built for me by one of my electrical engineering buddies. I had several offers to buy it before it ended up not surviving one of my moves. Maybe I'll get him to built a few more and put the extras up on eBay!

 

[RDK]

Should not be too hard to write a short program to do this, even an Excel spreadsheet should work.



Rick Kitson MBA P.Eng

Construction Project Management
From conception to completion

http://www.kitsonengineering.com