Are you procrastinating? Or just a regular company worker?

Have you ever found yourself at the end of the day and without any tasks fully completed? Or have you seen this in any of your co-workers? Because my answer has been yes to both of those questions.

The obvious reason one would think when analyzing this is procrastination. A really popular term right now that describes the action of voluntarily and unnecessarily postponing an activity even when we know the consequences are negative. And yes, there are a lot of people that suffer from this, primarily driven by remote work.

Sometimes though, we have to look for a different pattern. There are days of the week that we work a lot but the results are fewer than we expected. A report by Accenture proves that you’re not the only one who experiences this, business managers report that 54%of their total working time was lost to administrative management and coordination tasks, such as status meetings, email coordination, reporting, and scheduling.

For skilled workers, the time spent in these activities is higher, 60% of their time is lost to coordination, leaving less than 27% of their time for execution of the skills-based role they were hired for. So this is a problem many workers are going through right now: finding the time to complete the tasks they’re actually required to do.

Have you asked your workers what activities they spend most of their time on? Did you know that a 2018 survey by Adobe of over 1,000 office workers in the USA found they spent an average of 3.1 hours a day on work email?

Maybe it’s time to dig deeper into this and generate strategies that can help your workers not only be more productive but also feel better about the work they’re delivering. The strategies depend on the company, but some of them can be reducing meetings or time on meetings, changing their structure, standardizing processes, and of course, optimizing these activities with digital tools.