It’s long been maintained that social media (and really, the Internet in general) is quite possibly the most distracting technology ever designed. It’s also been maintained that these distractions wreak havoc with our productivity, and are more or less destroying the workday of more than one person. Microsoft’s recently carried out a study, which, believe it or not, has been adapted into an Infographic by the fine folks at RedeApp.
Essentially, the study involved the culture of distraction we’ve built up around ourselves, and an estimate of the precise cost of the constant ‘multi-tasking’ everybody’s not expected to deal with. You know how it is: you’re happily working away at something, and all of a sudden your phone rings. Or there’s someone at the door. Or your co-worker stops by for a chat. Or you receive an urgent email message. Or someone sends you a message on Facebook. Or someone shares an interesting new story with you. Or….
The list goes on more or less endlessly.
Once you’ve been distracted, you stay distracted for a while. You figure, well, now that you’ve been interrupted, you might as well take a break and see what’s going on with Twitter, or check your Facebook, or go swing by the water cooler for a chat. By the time you finally get yourself back on task, you’re hit with yet another interruption, yet another distraction, and the cycle completes itself all over again.
It’s actually more than a little distressing how damaging these interruptions are to our productivity. The study estimated that over 28% of each day is spent recovering from interruptions. That doesn’t seem like much, until you consider that most people only spend about 33% of the day at work (eight hours). That only leaves less than an hour and a half of actual work in an average workday. The total estimated cost of all these distractions is no less troubling:
$650 billion dollars a year. To put that into perspective, Mark Zuckerberg made $19 billion from Facebook’s Initial Public Offering, and he and his family are going to be set for life for at least the next four or five generations.
Check out the infographic below. Click for a full-sized image.
Via Bit Rebels
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