by Do you find yourself surrounded by time saving devices, and yet not having enough time? Then you’re not alone. I’ve found that there are many interruptions in my day and other things going on. I’ve wondered aloud to Virtuous Blonde if we had more time to get close to God or talk with family when it took hours to do the laundry and it was done by hand than now with machines.
My theory: We’ve taken the time that the devices were supposed to be saving us, and instead of investing it in people, we try to get more things done. This continues in a process that means more people expect us to get more things done, and that makes us more busy. How many jobs have ventured into the home and vice versa because there’s no time to get it done at work. It turns out I’m not alone in this thinking:
NEW YORK (Reuters) – Most U.S. workers say they feel rushed on the job, but they are getting less accomplished than a decade ago, according to newly released research.
Workers completed two-thirds of their work in an average day last year, down from about three-quarters in a 1994 study, according to research conducted for Day-Timers Inc., an East Texas, Pennsylvania-based maker of organizational products.
The biggest culprit is the technology that was supposed to make work quicker and easier, experts say.
Expectations that technology would save time and money largely haven’t been borne out in the workplace, said Ronald Downey, professor of psychology who specializes in industrial organization at Kansas State University.
“It just increases the expectations that people have for your production,” Downey said.
Even if productivity increases, it’s constantly outpaced by those expectations, said Don Grimme of GHR Training Solutions, a workplace training company based in Coral Springs, Florida.
“The irony is the very expectation of getting more done is getting in the way of getting more done,” he said. “People are stressed out.”
Companies that are flexible with workers’ time and give workers the most control over their tasks tend to fare better against the sea of rising expectations, experts said.
Check out the whole article, and see if this matches how you feel!
For me everything is soooo convenient that I get easily distracted and get sidetracked because I CAN catch up so quickly. So in the end I don’t get as much done.
I think that expectations that are so high on productivity cause some people to just “spin”. And because of our societal need for perfection we often cannot decide where to start and whether we should bother because if it’s not perfect then we have failed.
I have to say that working at my pace from my home job, I am able to accomplish a lot. I want to make sure I have everything done, so in the evenings, I can just sit back and relax or run errands.
Society needs to sit back and take a break from the rush and let things go. Less stress more productivity.