The 40-hour work week is a myth, writes Jory MacKay. She describes our bias toward being overly optimistic when it comes to how much time is needed to complete a future task. In other words, we are notoriously bad at figuring out how long a task will take us.
. . . most people typically have a window of about three hours where we’re really, really focused . . . we found that the average knowledge worker is only productive for 12.5 hours a week. That’s roughly 2.5 hours a day.”
Source: Fast Company, August 8, 2018. Link.
From our own research, we found that most people multitask during 40% of their productive time. It’s widely agreed that multitasking can have seriously negative effects on your ability to do good work
Also see: 9 Productivity experts on how you can finally beat distractions and get everything done, Fast Company, October 12, 2018.
INSIGHTS: We work a lot fewer hours than we think.