As you remember, we decided to deal with the question of how much and on what purpose we spend time when working. Let us briefly summarize the data and continue to discuss how our time actually affects our results.
Answers that have the maximum number of votes:
1. What percentage of tasks that you face at work are really new, interesting, and developing for you?
– 10%: 28.7% of the vote
– 20%: 26.8% of the vote
– 30%: 17.9% of the vote
For further calculations, we will take 20% as the average.
2. How long does the following take: coffee, daily meetings, distractions, communication with colleagues? To simplify it, let’s take the average number of hours per day.
– 2 hours a day: 29.4% of the vote
– 1 hour per day: 26.2% of the vote
– 3 hours a day: 19.2% of the vote
For further calculations, we will take an average of 2 hours per day.
3. How often there have been promotions or role changes as a result of the new tasks you have learned to complete?
– Once every 2-3 years: 22.8% of the vote
– Once every 3-5 years: 22.2% of the vote (shares the 3rd place)
– Those happen, but they happen by chance, and are not always connected: 22.2% of votes (shares the 2nd place)
Pay attention that in this case, the results are close together: 22.8-22.2%
Let’s go back to our reasoning.
Let’s have a look at how much time and for what purposes we spend to clarify what brings us some career results.
[+] 250 working days in 2021 according to the calendar of holidays and weekends.
[-] 20 days of leave; so we have approximately 230 working days a year. Our calculations are based on this figure.
[-] drinking coffee, daily meetings, distractions, communication with colleagues: at least 2 hours a day * 230 days = 460 hours a year. Let’s take the average: 575 hours. We see that about 55-60 working days are wasted on unproductive or service activities. We don’t take into account managers, who have 3-5 conference calls every day; for them, meetings are a job reality. 230-60 = 170 days a year left to work.
[-] “taxes” on the main activity in the form of reports, alterations, corrections (they come in different ways), but approximately 20% disappears because of those. 230 days * 20% = 46 days, 170 days for work minus another 46 days – 124 days for work. That is, about 50% of the working time available, and this is quite good. Not everyone has such an indicator. After all, there are also those of our readers who did not get to this reasoning due to overload or did not fill out the questionnaire so as not to remind themselves once again where the working time disappears:)
Let’s go back to the first question: what percentage of tasks you face is actually new, interesting, and developing for you? As we have found out, the answer is about 20%.
If out of all the stuff you do at work every day, the percentage of interesting tasks you grow up on is 20%, then out of 124 days that we devote to work, we have only 24 days a year when you do something that affects your career and tasks. We came to this conclusion based on the fact that just solving such tasks you grow professionally.
2 days a month ensure your professional growth and development.
Less than 10% of our efforts provide us with career development or influence it. Not even the cherished 20% that Pareto spoke about. Remember the Pareto rule?
Pareto principle, an empirical rule named after the economist and sociologist Wilfredo Pareto, is most generally formulated as “20% of efforts give 80% of the result, and the remaining 80% of efforts – only 20% of the result.”
The Pareto principle states that a small number of the most viable pods produce most of the peas.
You can believe or not believe in the applicability of this principle or law to your particular career, especially given that 22% of survey participants have qualitative changes every 2-3 years. But hang on, 100% – 22% = 78% of participants cannot say that every 2-3 years they have any career changes. And if we subtract from 100% also those who experience career changes every 3-5 years, we have the following picture:
100% – (22.2% + 22.8%) = 55% of survey participants don’t see any connection between career and professional changes and the efforts they make to achieve those. And there is also a “long tail” of participants who did not read the note. There are also those who read it but did not vote.
Let’s go back to the idea that 20% of efforts give us 80% of the result; through assumptions and calculations described above, we have come to the fact that we can allocate an average of about 10% of efforts to the tasks that provide us with this result.
It feels like we systematically rob ourselves 2 times, dear colleagues.
And this conclusion is a very bad one, especially if you have some expectations concerning your professional activities. It’s like an athlete who has the potential to win and develop is fed with half the required amount of nutrients. Most likely, such an athlete will have health problems, taking on a load while not being provided with resources.
We want to deploy this idea; so, we decided that it would be the best option to do it online. For this, as early as this week, January 21, we will hold an online seminar, “Systematic Steps for Permanent Professional and Career Changes.” Tomorrow we will announce this event, but for now – do not switch!
