{"id":3266,"date":"2011-06-13T08:23:24","date_gmt":"2011-06-13T13:23:24","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/ibiblio.org\/pjones\/blog\/?p=3266"},"modified":"2011-06-13T08:25:37","modified_gmt":"2011-06-13T13:25:37","slug":"whats-the-biggest-time-sink-email-or-other-social-media","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/pjones\/blog\/whats-the-biggest-time-sink-email-or-other-social-media\/","title":{"rendered":"What&#8217;s the biggest time sink Email or other social media?"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><div style=\"width: 260px\" class=\"wp-caption alignright\"><a href=\"http:\/\/www.fastcompany.com\/1753935\/i-cant-get-my-work-done-a-new-industry-survey-looks-at-workplace-distractions\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" alt=\"What the data say - phone and email are tops\" src=\"http:\/\/images.fastcompany.com\/upload\/workplace-distraction-activities.jpg\" title=\"What the data say - phone and email are tops\" width=\"250\" height=\"126\" \/><\/a><p class=\"wp-caption-text\">What the data say - phone and email are tops<\/p><\/div>No question about the answer. Take a look,<a href=\"http:\/\/finance.yahoo.com\/news\/Collaboration-Social-Tools-bw-982676005.html\"> a close look, at these findings from an harmon.ie commissioned survey run by uStamp (n=500)<\/a>.  Despite <a href=\"http:\/\/harmon.ie\/news\/i-cant-get-my-work-done-enormous-impact-distractions-workplace\">the co-mingling of the results at harmon.ie&#8217;s own site&#8217;s cover page for the report<\/a>, the survey shows there is a giant difference in the amount to time and effort wasted on email than on all other social practices on-line. harmon.ie also commits the sin of mislabeling online behaviors as addictive: &#8220;The increasingly common addiction to web-based activity \u2013 which psychologists call \u2018online compulsive disorder\u2019 \u2013 is pervasive in the workplace.&#8221; <\/p>\n<p>Still the survey provides interesting data that tell a tale of differences in distractions and their management. Let&#8217;s sample a few from <a href=\"http:\/\/finance.yahoo.com\/news\/Collaboration-Social-Tools-bw-982676005.html\">harmon.ie&#8217;s press release to Yahoo! Finance and elsewhere<\/a>:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>Users reported getting sidetracked in email processing (23%), switching windows to complete tasks (10%), personal online activities such as Facebook (9%), instant messaging (6%), text messaging (5%) and Web search (3%).\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<blockquote><p>Two out of three users will interrupt a group meeting to communicate with someone else digitally, either by answering email (48%), answering a mobile phone (35%), chatting via IM (28%), updating their status on a social network (12%) or tweeting (9%).<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<blockquote><p>The user\u2019s email inbox is the #1 location searched, with 76% of respondents reporting email as the first place they look. Other locations include the desktop (69%), file server (52%), shared workspace (34%), portable storage device (18%) and\/or cloud storage (9%).<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<blockquote><p>The average user emails two or more documents per day to an average of five people for review, increasing email-based document volume by up to 50 documents per week. The fact that these attachments are stored on multiple local computers complicates the challenge of finding the latest document versions as well as merging feedback from multiple reviewers.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>Individual users are more aggressive than even their employers in taking control of their own time and managing distractions:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>68% of respondents reported that their employers have implemented policies or technologies to minimize distractions, while 73% of end users have adopted self-imposed techniques to help maintain focus.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>It&#8217;s not too hard to see where the problems are. Email and worse the misuse of email for document sharing are by far the biggest waste of time and effort.<\/p>\n<p>I am aware that harmon.ie does have a commercial interest in these results. <a href=\"http:\/\/harmon.ie\/Company\/About\">They say of their company<\/a>: &#8220;The harmon.ie product family brings enterprise collaboration to every business user by transforming the email client into a collaboration and social workspace, called &#8216;social email&#8217;.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.fastcompany.com\/1753935\/i-cant-get-my-work-done-a-new-industry-survey-looks-at-workplace-distractions\">Fast Company features a good summary of the results<\/a> &#8212; but keep in mind that the author, <a href=\"http:\/\/www.fastcompany.com\/user\/david-lavenda-0\">David Lavenda<\/a>, is an executive with harmon.ie. David clearly discloses his relationship to harmon.ie in the course of the article. <strong>+1<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>No question about the answer. Take a look, a close look, at these findings from an harmon.ie commissioned survey run by uStamp (n=500). Despite the co-mingling of the results at harmon.ie&#8217;s own site&#8217;s cover page for the report, the survey shows there is a giant difference in the amount to time and effort wasted on [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[24,1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3266","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-noemail","category-general","post-preview"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/pjones\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3266","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/pjones\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/pjones\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/pjones\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/pjones\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3266"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/pjones\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3266\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3271,"href":"https:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/pjones\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3266\/revisions\/3271"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/pjones\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3266"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/pjones\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3266"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/pjones\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3266"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}