Our workdays are getting longer, but we are squandering valuable minutes, hours — even entire days. Although no one seems to agree on how much time we’re frittering away, the unanimous conclusion is it’s costing companies billions of dollars.

On average, workers in the United States spend 45 hours a week at work — but describe 16 of those hours as “unproductive,” according to a 2005 study by Microsoft, which drew responses from more than 38,000 people in 200 countries. In turn, America Online and Salary.com determined that workers actually work a total of three days a week, wasting the other two.

The average worker admits to squandering 2.09 hours per 8-hour workday, not including lunch and scheduled break-time, according to a 2005 survey of 10,000 employees by America Online and Salary.com.

As a matter of practice, companies assume a certain amount of wasted time when determining employee pay. However, the latter survey’s findings indicate that employees are wasting about twice as much time as their employers expect.

In fact, Salary.com calculated that employers spend $759 billion per year on salaries for which real work was expected but not actually performed.

The experts disagree on how we are frittering away all this time, though: the AOL survey says time is lost most to surfing the Internet (which, given the source, is either self-congratulatory or self-incriminating); and the Microsoft survey points to worthless meetings. Respondents to the Microsoft survey said they spent 5.6 hours each week in meetings and 71 percent of them thought that those meetings were not productive.

Indeed, employees say they’re not always to blame for this wasted time. In addition to unproductive meetings, unclear objectives and lack of team communication were among the other top time wasters that workers around the world said make them feel unproductive for as much as a third of their workweek on average. Moreover, consider the top two reasons given by AOL/Salary.com respondents for such wanton abuse of company time:

• More than 33 percent of respondents cited “lack of work” as their biggest reason for wasting time; and
• More than 23 percent said they wasted time at work because they feel they are underpaid.

Socializing with co-workers ranked high in the AOL/Salary.com survey, while conducting personal business, “spacing out,” running errands and making personal phone calls were also popular time-wasting workplace activities.

But you say you spend all your time working? And your boss is running you ragged?

You’re not alone.

Almost a third of employees in the U.S. alone feel overworked or overwhelmed by the amount of work they have to do, according to a study conducted by the Families and Work Institute, a nonprofit organization that conducts research about the changing nature of work and family life.

The average professional workweek has expanded steadily over the last decade, according to the Center for Work Life Policy, and logging 70+ hours is now the norm, especially at the top.

Plus there are those of us who work even when we’re at home. A poll conducted for Staples, Inc. earlier this year found that almost half of the small-business managers in the U.S. work during time meant for family. (See: Big Numbers for Small Business) Overall, those surveyed reported long hours, less vacation and an ever-blurring line separating work from personal time. In today’s competitive business world, employers and employees in small to mid-size companies still work very hard to protect what they have.

So how do we reconcile these two conflicting trends — “the fact that we are working harder and wasting more time?” The New York Times recently asked:

A crotchety boss might say that we’re working longer because we’re wasting time, but the opposite may also be true. We are wasting time because we are working harder.

“The longer you work, the less efficient you are,” Bob Kustka, the founder of productivity and time-management consulting firm Fusion Factor, told the New York column.

Kustka said workers are like athletes: they are most efficient in concentrated bursts. Elite athletes “play a set of tennis, a down of football or an inning of baseball and have a pause in between.” Working energy, like physical energy, is “best used in spurts where we work hard on a few focused activities and then take a brief respite,” he told Lisa Belkin at the Times.

Unfortunately, those brief respites look awfully similar to wasting time.

In the end, because time is a finite resource, it seems an unmanageable commodity. How we manage ourselves affects our productivity, but can we manage what we do with the time we have?

By the way, in the America Online/Salary.com survey, “manufacturing” ranked second in the top five time-conserving industries, topped only by “shipping and receiving.”

How ’bout it, dear reader? Working hard or hardly working?

Resources

Time Wasted? Perhaps It’s Well Spent
by Lisa Belkin
The New York Times, May 31, 2007

Wasted Time At Work Costing Companies Billions
by Dan Malachowski
Salary.com

Survey Finds Workers Average Only Three Productive Days per Week
Microsoft, March 15, 2005

Is the American Dream on Steroids?
The Center for Work-Life Policy

Small Business Managers Reveal Startling Work Hours and Habits
International Communications Research, Jan. 8, 2007

Staples Survey Offers Insights into Work-Life Conflicts
Staples, Inc., Jan. 8, 2007