A paradox of modern working is that while there has never been more effort and technology dedicated to making it easier to work, it has never been more difficult to get any work done.
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There is a serious point to all this. Since 2008, British productivity has increased at 0.5 per cent a year, compared with an average of 2.3 per cent a year between 1974 and 2008. Britain is falling behind its competitor countries. While individuals can’t do much about the structural problems in the economy, there are a few tactics to help firms and individuals work better day-to-day.
For many companies, meetings are the great vampire bat on time. Organising them, preparing for them, sitting in them, debriefing afterwards. Paul Holbrook is the author of Today, Holbrook offers advice for businesses about maximising their productivity. In his consultations, he typically finds that about 20 per cent of time is “floating”, which is to say not adding obvious value. Common examples include recurring meetings where attendance has become habit, reading emails that are not core to your role, or being unnecessarily interrupted with questions because it’s easier to interrupt you instead of the interrupter thinking a problem through.