Company Releases Research on Rushed Workers, Posts Wrong Link

Here’s something to confirm your worst fears: a Reuters story (thanks, John) that quotes research suggesting that

Most U.S. workers say they feel rushed on the job, but they are getting less accomplished than a decade ago… 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, an East Texas, Pennsylvania-based maker of organizational products.

The biggest problem, the piece says, is technology. As we take on more tasks we feel we do them less well, and feel we’re accomplishing less. Here are the comparisons:

• The average time spent on a computer at work: 16 hours a week vs 9.5 hours in 1994
• Workers who “feel extremely or very productive”: 51 percent vs 83 percent in 1994
• Workers who felt they accomplished at least half their daily planned work:50 percent vs 82 percent
• Workers who considered themselves very or extremely successful: 28 percent vs 40 percent

Needless to say this doesn’t surprise me. And I don’t just mean because the research was commissioned by a time organizing company . It’s a truism to say we’re bombarded with too many demands on our time and I’ve warbled many times before about how SlackBerries actually reduce productivity rather than increase it.

What amuses me most about this story, though, is the fact the story appears on the sponsoring company’s own website but with a link to the wrong press release. In fact, I can’t find the correct press release on the website, even though the Reuters story was written on February 22, so it must have been available for a day at least. Could someone at Day-Timers have been in such a hurry they forgot to post the press release, or inserted the wrong link into the Reuters story? 

technorati tags: work, productivity, PR, organizing