Restart the computer (this is what the computer scientist always recommends).
Try to access up to three times with the same password.
Accept that you have forgotten it and start creating a new one (the third of the month).
Repeat passwords that mysteriously never match.
Go online.
Check email.
Fight with autocorrect.
Close that video that has been opened without anyone hitting play.
Don't get it.
Look at the e-mail again (we check it every six minutes, that's 121 times a day).
Trying to escape from that
banner
ad that just colonized your screen and instead manage to close the window you were in...
Working in 2022 is wasting time.
Very much.
Every day.
From Monday to Friday.
Measurement freaks turn up from time to time with depressing calculations that show how a decade scrolling
on the phone and four months deciding what to watch on Netflix
escape us throughout life .
A study cited by
The Economist
and attributed to professors from the Maryland and Delaware Enterprise University Partnership (MADEUP) extrapolates these cabals to working life.
After asking 5,000 people in the UK and US how many minutes they spend each day on inconsequential tasks, they set out to calculate the weighted
total futility rate.
, to which they attributed the not at all innocent acronyms WTF).
This rate calculates the years lost at work in useless tasks, and excludes the time spent in meetings because they consider that they are not equally useless for everyone.
Although they are for many.
The study shows that a good part of our time and energy is consumed, for example, in fighting with the text autocorrector that puts “out” where we wanted to put “greetings”, or “an arm” where it should say “a hug”.
The autocorrector insists and until your third correction it doesn't realize that you send
that
e-mail .
Experts calculate that we spend 20 minutes a day on that.
Of course, we also spend hours correcting our own mistakes.
Since the study was based on a survey in English, the most common error detected was typing
thnaks
instead of
thanks
.
The report specifies that 145 days is “the gestation period of a goat”, and also the sum of the time we spend logging in each day throughout our working lives.
Several months go by trying to remember passwords, entering wrong passwords and resetting them over and over again.
In this time, just under five months, we also count the minutes we spend staring at the screen waiting for something to happen in there, for the mysteries of the soul of the computer to be revealed to us.
The weighted hours of uselessness of the working day calculated by the Maryland and Delaware Enterprise University association include the minutes we spend closing notifications, rejecting persistent requests to update the operating system or closing advertising windows.
Throughout our working lives, we spend four months cleaning the computer and six weeks escape us deleting
e-mails
and folders.
Several days we spend
bugging
Slack messages that are not addressed to us and closing notifications of articles that we will never read, or disabling alarms of events that will never take place.
Layout and formatting nitpicks, for example setting the margins of a Google Doc or finding exactly where that missing bracket goes in an Excel formula are at the top of the time spent on inconsequential tasks.
The study equates the hours a contemporary worker spends changing the size and color of fonts over his entire career with the year Shakespeare spent writing
King Lear
.
Reviewing a document and including sensible comments to the text that will later have to be accepted, eliminated or counteracted with other even sharper comments that in turn generate a cascade of comments of various colors whose sequence no one is able to determine is another of the tasks that they lead the WTF index.
Dramas deserve a special section: documents that are not saved, batteries that run out or internet connections that fail.
Surely this study, baptized as
Made Up
by the initials of the presumed institution of its authors (in English, invented study), would not resist a strictly scientific approach, since it is only an extrapolation of figures, but its estimates are not far from the numbers that come out to the IDC consultancy, which ensures that each employee spends more than 14 hours a week reading and answering emails, more than 13 creating digital documents, and almost 10 searching for information.
The consultant puts a price on adaptation to new technologies and their continuous updates, setting it at 7.5 million euros, to which another 7 million are added derived from not finding what you are looking for in time.
The consulting firm Gallup has called this dead time mental absenteeism.
A being without being.
A limbo that 80% of Spanish employees may inhabit at some point.
Technology is at the heart of the Weighted Total Futility Index, but it could also help when autocorrect options are synced, or facial recognition for passwords and fingerprints for login are implemented.
Then we may not be able to write
King Lear either, as
The Economist
suggests
, but at least we will have stopped remembering impossible passwords.
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