Time management statistics
Demonstrate a clear need for productivity training and stress the benefits of being organized:
Time and Multitasking
A study last fall by Basex, a New York research firm, found that office distractions ate up 2.1 hours a day for the average worker. That adds up to $28 billion a year in the United States alone. Another study found that employees devoted an average of 11 minutes to a project before being distracted. Researchers Gloria Mark and Victor Gonsalez of the University of California, Irvine, found that once interrupted, it takes workers 25 minutes to return to the original task, if they return at all. People switch activities, such as making a call, speaking with someone in their cubicle or working on a document, every three minutes on average, Mark said.
Betty Lin-Fisher (for Knight Ridder Newspapers), Houston Chronicle, 2/27/2006)
Employees spend an average of 36 minutes per day at work on personal tasks. By gender, men take 44 minutes and women 29 minutes, with the 18-34 year old group using the most time.
Office Team surveys, February 2007
The cost of interruptions to the U.S. economy is estimated at $588 billion a year.
Jonathan B. Spira, "The Cost of Not Paying Attention," Basex Research, 2005
A recent study from the Institute of Psychiatry at the University of London suggests that your IQ falls 10 points when you're fielding constant emails, text messages, and calls, the same loss you'd experience if you missed an entire night's sleep and more than double the 4-point loss you'd have after smoking marijuana. On average men fared worse than women because, researchers say, men have more difficulty multitasking.
YogaJournal, p. 22, 12/2005
On a typical day, office workers are interrupted about seven times an hour, which adds up to 56 interruptions a day, 80% of which are considered trivial, according to time-management experts.
Wendy Cole, TIME Magazine, 10/11/2004
People who multitask are less efficient than those who focus on one project at a time, says a study published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology....Managing two mental tasks at once reduces the brainpower available for either task, according to a study published in the journal NeuroImage.
Sue Shellenberger ( from the Wall Street Journal), Star Telegram: "Multitasking Makes You Stupid, Studies Say," 12/2/2003
For 10 years researchers studied the behavior of busy managers in nearly a dozen large companies. Their findings on managerial behavior showed that fully 90% of managers squander their time in all sorts of ineffective activities. In other words, a mere 10% of managers spend their time in a committed, purposeful, and reflective manner.
Dr. Helke Bruch and Dr. Sumantra Ghoshal, Harvard Business Review, 2/2002
Time and Stress
71% of white-collar workers feel stressed about the amount of information they must process and act on while doing business; 60% feel overwhelmed.
Institute of the Future, Menlo Park, CA
45 percent of high-earning managers are too tired to converse with their spouse or partner after a long day at the office. This strain is wreaking havoc on family and personal lives.
Study by Sylvia Ann Hewlett & Carolyn Buck Luce, Harvard Business Review, 12/2006
The average work week is 54 hours. In an average week, only 14 percent work 40 hours or less. One-third work 50-59 hours a week, and 80% work between 40 and 79 hours. at their jobs according to a 2006 study of 2,500 Americans.
Sage Software Survey, Priority 2/2007
About 40% of American adults get less than seven hours of sleep on weekdays, up from 34% in 2001. Almost 60% of meals are rushed, and 34% of lunches are choked down on the run. To avoid wasting time, we're talking on our cell phones while rushing to work, answering e-mails during conference calls, waking up at 4 a.m. to call Europe, and generally multitasking our brains out.
Business Week, p. 60, 10/3/2005
51.2 million Americans, or 35% are vacation deprived, earning an average of 14 days and taking eleven of those days, the least amount of vacation days among their international counterparts.
Expedia.com, 2007
Rising stress levels can cause seriously inappropriate behavior. 13% of surveyed workers claimed to have personally committed, or have observed co-workers commit, an act that would be described as "desk rage"--angry or destructive outbursts during work time because of the high levels of stress.
Caravan Opinion Research, 2000
U.S. companies lose between $200-$300 billion a year due to absenteeism, tardiness, burnout, decreased productivity, worker's compensation claims, increased employee turnover, and medical insurance costs resulting from employee work-related stress.
National Safety Council, Priority Magazine, 1-2/2007
In general, a third of all American workers could be viewed as chronically overworked in 2004, according to a report by the nonprofit Families and Work Institute in New York City. The more overworked employees were, the more likely they were to make mistakes, feel angry with their employers and resent colleagues they felt weren't working as hard, the study found. People who felt overworked also reported higher stress levels, more symptoms of clinical depression and poorer health.
Jennifer Scott Cimperman, Houston Business Journal, 2/27/2006
In a recent Gallup Poll, 80 percent of workers said they feel stress on the job; nearly half said they need help in learning how to manage stress; and 42 percent said their coworkers need help in coping with stress....Job stress can lead to several problems, including illness and injury for employees, as well as higher insurance costs and lost productivity for employees.
Mike Maseda, Houston Business Journal, 9/3-9/2004
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention state unequivocally that 80% of our medical expenditures are now stress related.
Fast Company Magazine, p. 88, 2/2003
At the Mayo Clinic 80 to 85% of patients were ill, directly or indirectly because of mental stress.
Mayo Clinic study
Rising stress levels can cause seriously inappropriate behavior. 13% of surveyed workers claimed to have personally committed, or have observed co-workers commit, an act that would be described as "desk rage"--angry or destructive outbursts during work time because of the high levels of stress.
Caravan Opinion Research, 2000
At least 30 percent of employed adults don't take all their vacation days, according to a 2005 Harris Interactive poll. Each year, Americans hand back 421 million days to their employers.
YogaJournal, p. 72, 11/2005
Of senior FORTUNE 500 males executives, 84% says they'd like job options that let them realize their professional aspirations whle having more time for things outside work: 55% say they're willing to sacrifice income. Half say they wonder if the sacrifices they've made for their careers are worth it.
Fortune, p. 112, 11/28/2005
The number of individuals citing excessive hours at work on the part of a spouse has tripled. A lack of communication and a lack of attention are also frequently mentioned by both sexes as reasons for going their separate ways.
Patricia Katz, Pause Newsletter, 3/29/2006
Since 1973, the median number of hours that people say they work has jumped from 41 a week to 49, according to Harris Interactive....That has mostly come out of people's leisure time, which has dropped from 26 to 19 hours a week over the same period.
Wall Street Journal, 1/26/2004
A national poll found that 96% of employees want more flexibility and control over their time and that 73% are willing to curtail their careers in favor of more family time.
Fast Company Magazine, 1/2004
Paper and Filing
In surveying 1000 middle managers of large companies in the U.S. and U.K., 59% miss important information almost every day because it exists within the company but they cannot find it.
Accenture, Wall Street Journal, 5/14/2007
15% of all paper handled in businesses is lost, according the the Delphi Group, a Boston consultancy, and 30 percent of all employees' time is spent trying to find lost documents.
Jane M. Von Bergen (Knight Ridder Newspapers), The Boston Globe, 3/21/2006
Executives waste six weeks per year searching for lost documents.
From a survey of 2,600 executives by Esselte, maker of Pendaflex and Dymo, FastCompany Magazine, 8/2004
95% of all information is on paper.
International Data Corporation, Document Magazine, 2/2004
A paper by Berkeley scientists estimated that information created on print, film, tape and disk in 2002 was roughly equivalent to all the text in the Library of Congress--multiplied by 500,000. The amount has doubled in the past three years and will grow even faster as people begin to take advantage of low-cost storage technology.
Steven Levy, Newsweek, 11/10/2003
Email and Internet
The average projected number of corporate emails sent and received per person, per day: 142 in 2007, 156 in 2008, 177 in 2009, 199 in 2010, 228 in 2011. By 2009, workers are expecting to spend 41% of their time in email management.
Radicati Group, Palo Alto, 2007
In 2007, a group of Microsoft workers took, on average, 15 minutes to return to serious mental tasks, such as writing reports or computer code, after dealing with incoming email. They wandered off to reply to other messages or browse the Web.
New York Times, 3/25/2007
15% of Americans say they are addicted to email.
59% of those using portable devices check email as it arrives.
43% of users sleep near their email unit to hear incoming messages.
40% consider email accessibility when they plan a trip.
83% check their email once a day while on vacation.
43% check their email first thing every morning.
AOL & Opinion Research Corp., study 7/26/07
19% of all drivers text message while driving. 37% of those drivers are between the ages of 18 and 27.
Nationwide Mutual Insurance Co., Christopher Cooper, Wall Street Journal 3/14/07
About 24% of companies have had employee emails subpoenaed by a court or regulator, up from 20% two years ago, and 15% have gone to court to defend against lawsuits triggered by an employee email, up from 13%, according to the 2006 Workplace E-Mail, Instant Messaging and Blog survey released by the American Management Association and the ePolicy Institute, in Columbus, Ohio.
Wall Street Journal, 7/2006
92% of studied respondents say they make or take work related communications outside of the office, including during vacations. Nearly three-fourths says they stay "switched on" during weekends, and a fifth have interrupted a date for work reasons.
Lexamark International study, Wall Street Journal 12/12/06
More than one in twenty U.S. adults surveyed nationally said their relationships have suffered from excessive use of the Internet. 12% said they often stay online more than they would like to. 14% say it is difficult to stay offline for several days.
Elias Abonjaoude, Stanford University, Impulse Control Disorders Clinic
Americans will consume media 9.5 hours a day in 2007.
Nielsen Survey, Wall Street Journal, 12/2006
Organizing and Clutter
700,000 to 1.4 million Americans may have compulsive disorder syndrome--difficulty in throwing away anything for fear that they may need the items later.
Self Storage Association: Obsessive Compulsive Foundation
Getting rid of excess clutter would eliminate 40 percent of the housework in the average home.
National Soap and Detergent Association
About 70% of office trash is waste paper. The average U.S. company could recycle up to 50% of the current waste.
Priority Magazine, 9/2007