{"id":8123,"date":"2022-06-21T15:27:46","date_gmt":"2022-06-21T15:27:46","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/?p=8123"},"modified":"2022-06-21T15:27:46","modified_gmt":"2022-06-21T15:27:46","slug":"wtf-weighted-total-futility","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/2022\/06\/21\/wtf-weighted-total-futility\/","title":{"rendered":"WTF: weighted total futility"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>An article in the Economist's\u00a0<em><a href=\"https:\/\/www.economist.com\/business\/2022\/06\/16\/work-the-wasted-years\">Bartelby<\/a><\/em>\u00a0column this week served to inform and amuse. \u00a0But should it have done?<\/p>\n<p>It begins:<\/p>\n<p>\"Few things are more depressing than estimates of how much time people spend on a specific activity over the course of their lives. \u00a0You know the sort of thing: you will spend one-third of your life asleep, almost a decade looking at your phone and four months deciding what to watch on streaming services. A new study, by academics from the Maryland and Delaware Enterprise University Partnership (<small>MADEUP<\/small>), applies this approach to the workplace. By conducting a time-use survey of 5,000 office workers in America and Britain, the researchers identify the number of minutes that people waste on pointless activities each working day. \u00a0(Meetings are excluded: they often turn out to be useless but not always and not for everyone.) \u00a0The authors then extrapolate these figures to come up with a \u201cweighted total futility\u201d (<small>wtf<\/small>) lifetime estimate of time that could have been better spent. The results are literally unbelievable. ...\"<\/p>\n<p>Here are a few examples:<\/p>\n<p>Correcting typos takes up an average of 20 minutes in every white-collar worker\u2019s day, the equivalent of 180 days, or half a year, over a 45-year career.<\/p>\n<p class=\"article__body-text\">months are wasted trying to remember passwords, entering them wrongly or updating them. Just as much time is spent waiting for something to happen, a great economy-wide period of vacant staring at a screen.<\/p>\n<p>Deleting emails takes up about six weeks of your life.<\/p>\n<p>Shakespeare wrote \u201cKing Lear\u201d in the time an average office worker spends changing font sizes during their career.<\/p>\n<p>Co-ordinating diaries for meetings that will later be cancelled: a month.<\/p>\n<p>Waiting for people to repeat themselves because they were on mute by mistake: a fortnight.<\/p>\n<p>Spending hours crafting an email and then leaving it in the drafts folder: two days.<\/p>\n<p>.................................................<\/p>\n<p>So much of the article rings true that it's hard to believe that it is MADEUP. \u00a0Had it appeared on April 1st, I'd have been sure ...<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>An article in the Economist's\u00a0Bartelby\u00a0column this week served to inform and amuse. \u00a0But should it have done? It begins: \"Few things are more depressing than estimates of how much time people spend on a specific activity over the course of...<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":237,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[2,3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-8123","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-comment","category-new-publications"],"acf":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8123","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/237"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8123"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8123\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8123"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8123"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8123"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}