10/31/2023

The Bad Habit That’s Sabotaging Your Workday

Employees must curb 'shallow work' obsessions

A few years back, a work productivity tool called RescueTime published a sobering, yet unsurprising analysis about our compulsive relationship with email and instant messaging tools.

The report found that the average "knowledge worker" (a term that describes “writers, designers, developers and project managers”) cannot go six minutes without checking a platform like Gmail, Slack or Microsoft Teams. Of this group, 35 percent of employees reported interrupting a productive task every three minutes to check a communication tool. And only 19 percent of employees said they could focus on work for 20 minutes or more... before refreshing their messages yet again.

While managers tend to emphasize the importance of messaging platforms — in some cases, going as far as to implement employee monitoring software — studies indicate that (a) when workers feel “stalked,” they turn petulant on purpose (they’re more likely to take unapproved breaks or disregard instructions), and (b) when workers do spend all their time online, they don’t get much done.

Please select this link to read the complete article from InsideHook.