There’s an insidious attitude permeating many companies; that when employees have their bodies-in-their-seats, it means they’re productive. But if you’ve ever seen studies on actual employee productivity, or if you’ve ever forced yourself to sit at your desk for eight straight hours, you know that having a body-in-the-seat does not equal productivity. And the problem becomes especially acute when the body-in-seat mentality follows suddenly-remote employees into their home workspace.
Before the pandemic, a Leadership IQ study found that remote employees are 87% more likely to love their jobs than people that work in offices. Why? One factor is that normally-remote employees have figured out productivity hacks to enable themselves to spend more concentrated time on deep work. They’re able to focus without interruptions, and one way they accomplish that is with time-chunking. Unfortunately, that’s a concept that has been slow to permeate traditional working environments.
A study from RescueTime found that knowledge workers check email and Slack every six minutes, with more than a third checking email or Slack every three minutes. And 40% of knowledge workers never get more than 30 minutes straight of focused time. The email interruptions and lack of straight focus time help explain why knowledge workers, on average, have just 2 hours and 48 minutes a day for productive tasks.
By contrast, top freelancers, who’ve worked from home for years, have long known the fallacy of the body-in-seat mentality. And that’s why they’re more likely to work intensely for dedicated blocks of time.
Read the full article @ Forbes
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