“I say to people ‘what did you do today?’ And they say ‘thank goodness I finished going through my emails’, and I say ‘but that’s not producing a product or a service, that’s a vehicle for information.’”
Wise words from 50th anniversary professor of organisational psychology and health at Manchester Business School’s Cary Cooper, regarding the dangers of confusing wading through a mountain of emails with actually getting stuff done.
It’s an all too-familiar scenario for many. While email is now an indispensible tool for most, spam emails, badly designed software and colleagues using email where a quick chat would have been quicker are all adding up to overload and, crucially, loss of productivity.
Of course there are many other potential factors which contribute to that ‘I could have achieved more’ feeling at the end of a long day – and to the UK still lagging far behind other developed countries in the productivity stakes.
To find out what these are on a day-to-day basis for employees, including our hardworking HR readership, HR magazine invites you to take part in our Reclaim Your Time survey.
As this campaign reflects, your time is valuable, so we’ve kept our survey short. And as an added incentive we're entering all who complete this survey into a prize draw for a Linx 1010 32GB Windows 10 Tablet.
Please do take just a little time to help us uncover what’s getting in the way of you achieving your very best. And how we can all start to tackle this.
Our findings will be published in HR magazine, on hrmagazine.co.uk and in a special Reclaim Your Time ebook, sponsored by IBM. So watch this space.
Click here to complete the survey.
