Time Theft, or How Corporations Waste Your Time
A German colleague of mine, let's call him Alex, has a ritual that I admire. After he comes back from vacation, Alex opens his laptop, and deletes everything in his inbox. Just like that, he's achieved Inbox Zero.
This sounds batshit crazy until you hear his reasoning: if it mattered, they'll send it again. Is this reckless? Yes. But does it work? Also yes. After all, if Alex has properly let his team know about his forthcoming absence, there is no reason they should be email him except to keep him appraised of what he missed while he was back. And if there are tasks that Alex is responsible for, surely they could wait until he comes back from vacation.
But this assumes that Alex has unlimited time on his hands, and that his value is best used reading up on week-old emails instead of working on projects. It's this pernicious lack of respect for the employee's time, which hurts both the employee and the employer, that I want to discuss.
If your company has ever hired and agency, freelancer, or consultant, this will be even more perplexing. For these individuals, every hour has a number attached. Every deliverable is tightly guarded. Every scope changed is agonized over. Why? Because there's a direct monetary value that is visible in the form of a new invoice.
This changes for employees because your hours are a fixed cost. That means that they are essentially pre-paid, sunk, already on the books. The meter isn't actively running. So the hour is free to waste.
That's a strong word, waste. After all, nobody decides to waste your time. Your manager adding a fourth weekly stand up isn't trying to be less effective. She's rational, and thinks that there's no cost to taking thirty minutes from eight people, twice a week. But when you actually do the math, you realize that this one hour of meeting has an annual cost of approximately $20,000!
Calculation:
8 people × $100,000 salary = $800,000 payroll Hourly rate: $100,000 ÷ 2,080 hours = $48.08 Meetings: 30 minutes × twice weekly × 52 weeks = 52 hours/person/year Total: 8 × 52 × $48.08 = $20,000/year
That excludes preparation, follow-up, and productivity lost to context switching.
The biggest time thief: meetings. The average employee now loses about eleven The average employee now loses about eleven and a half hours a week to them. For those of you paying attention, that's nearly a third of the workweek gone. Most of time, just to talk about the work instead of doing it.
A useful meeting is a real thing: clear agenda, one topic, a decision to make, the right people in the room. We've all sat in a few of those. But we've also sat in those that are definitely not that. Take a look at your calendar: thirty minutes, no agenda, a title that could mean anything. I'll show up unprepared, because there was nothing to prepare, and we'll spend the first ten minutes working out why we're there.
And why in the world is every meeting thirty minutes? Is there a magical universal law says that every problem on earth resolves in exactly half an hour? Or....is that this the default in Outlook?
"But Anthony," you say, "I don't book these. They're booked for me. I surely can't just not show up?!" You are right, for now. Eventually you'll be the one sending the invite. And even the ones sent to you, you can bend. You'd be amazed what a simple message to the organizer can do: "what do you need from me, and what does a good outcome look like?" After asking these questions, the organizer might even realize that the meeting isn't as necessary as she thought...
And then, there's the inbox. My screen time usually sits between 2 & 3 hours, and I'm not proud of it. As a society, we've correctly made the decision that we should spent less time looking at Instagram and TikTok. But Outlook is the original addiction. The pop ups, the sounds, the urge to check your inbox to see if something urgent came up. Meta at least admits it's for fun. But Outlook is even more pernicious because it's dressed up as productivity. But here's the truth: checking your email 77 times a day (yes, that's a real stat!) isn't making you more productive.
If you're pulled out of every thought by a notification, you are not doing work that matters. The work that matters needs an uninterrupted hour, and you're handing your hours away one ping at a time.
Why do you think executives have people whose whole job is to stand between them and the inbox? Because most of what arrives is noise, and someone at that salary can't afford to sort it themselves. You don't get an assistant. So be your own. Read email twice a day, at times you choose, and make sure your team know that this is what you'll be doing. The rest belongs to the work. Being unreachable for three hours isn't slacking, it's the job (unless you work in crisis comms or something)
And finally, admin work. The work about the work. Status reports. Timesheets. Decks that will never see the light of day. Decks that summarize other decks. Just endless decks, please make it stop!
None of it makes the actual work better. That's not what it's for. It's there to make your work legible to someone above you to turn what you did into something that can be counted and reported upward. We call it transparency. Others, surveillance.
Now here's my advice on how to handle this work: Do the bare minimum. You can't just dodge all of these corporate obligations without incurring consequences. But these are not the sort of tasks that are going to make or break your career. No one ever got promoted for providing a report on time.
Again, this isn't an excuse so that you can go home early. This is so that you can focus most of your attention on work that truly matters to you and your organization.
Your employer bought your time once, at the start. Whether it goes to work that matters, or bleeds out in half-hour increments into other people's calendars, is up to you. What's certain is that if you aren't diligent, your time will be in other people's hands.
So it's on you. The calendar fills itself with other people's priorities by default. The projects that move something only happen if you fight for the hours to do them.
Nobody is coming to give your time back. Take it.