"Waste time well" - Futurist Jim Carroll
Wasted time is productive time.
And yet, it is criticized. It is the common view that those who waste time are lazy, distracted, and not at all helpful.
And apparently, there is a lot of this unproductive time - according to one survey, 69% of employees admitted to wasting time at work daily. Another study found that people spend at least 2 1/2 hours a week at work doing things unrelated to actual work, such as spending time on social media. (I would have thought the number was higher.)
One reason is that people are distracted.
According to the Workplace Trends Index 2023, a study prepared by Microsoft together with Edelman Data & Intelligence, workers around the world accumulate a "digital debt": the difficulty of properly managing and processing the growing volume of chats, emails, and data they receive daily. Every minute a worker spends managing that digital debt is a minute away from creative work.
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According to a study by Economist Impact, these distractions at work cost the U.S. economy around $468 billion annually - that's the time lost to all of these unproductive meetings, emails, and workplace chat messages, which collectively account for significant hours of lost productivity per knowledge worker each year
And when people are distracted, they lose their focus - and lose their ability to pursue 'creative time.'
According to the survey, 60% of Argentine workers claim to have "struggled" to have enough time and energy to finish their work and are 2.9 times more likely to say that they "struggle" with innovation and strategic thinking (compared to 3.5 times of those surveyed globally). Similarly, almost 3 out of 4 Argentine leaders (71%) said they were concerned about the lack of innovation (versus 60% globally).
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And yet, is all that time wasted? If someone is busy surfing the Web or discovering some great new ideas on social media, is it wasted time? Probably not - because innovation is hard, and innovation requires a lot of serendipitous creativity - another study indicates that it takes about 3,000 ideas to achieve just an idea that can be a commercial success.
It's always been the case that you need a lot of off-the-wall ideas to get a few good ones.
This means you should spend more time wasting time, not less.
Futurist Jim Carroll considers himself to be very good at wasting time.