IBM has a new advertisment out that has caught my eye.  What makes it so powerful is that it is applicable to all people and companies.  Simply it is:

“ Stop selling what you have. Start selling what they need.”

It does not get any more direct.

Where does your company lose the most productivity?

Business Meetings 

These results provide us with some perspective on how office workers are working in a state of confusion, either self imposed or from there business culture.  We have long known that many company meetings are sink-holes for productivity. This survey shows us that 36.54% of you view meetings are ineffective and/or have no clear purpose.

For entertainment purposes, here is a FedEx Kinko’s commercial that highlights the comedic aspect of some business meetings.

We also seem to be spending an inordinate amount of time in one of the most huge time wasters… email!  Survey takers say that 33.30% of them waste time on email.  (This is my biggest time-sink.)  A long-term study indicates that workers are not as productive as they were five years ago, in part because of e-mail.

In its White-Collar Productivity Index (WPI), a five-year study of more than 1,000 users, IBT-USA found that e-mail is not as effective as a productivity tool as it’s cracked up to be. The WPI shows that the time spent handling e-mail has skyrocketed, from about four hours per week to 8.8 hours per week during the study period. And time spent handling paper mail has not dropped proportionally–it decreased from two hours per week in 2000 to 1.3 hours in 2004. But the downturn in productivity is not just an IT problem; time spent attending ineffective meetings has risen from 0.7 hours per week in 2000 to 2.1 hours per week in 2004.

Internet Usage

This number surprised me the most, 6.67%.  I was surprised to see that many of you view your Internet usage as a minor distraction.  Management might disagree with these results.  Maybe because many companies have instituted programs to monitor and curtail Internet usage.  This time-waster issue deserves more research.

Conclusions

Understanding where we waste time is essential in understanding and taking advantage of ways to improve our effectiveness and productivity.  Life is naturally confusing.  Learn from where you waste time, and improve upon those ineffective segments of your life.

Take advantage of every opportunity to practice your communication skills so that when important occasions arise, you will have the gift, the style, the sharpness, the clarity, and the emotions to affect other people.” — Jim Rohn

I experience a period of frightening clarity in those moments when nature is so beautiful. I am no longer sure of myself, and the paintings appear as in a dream — Vincent van Gogh

Gratitude unlocks the fullness of life. It turns what we have into enough, and more. It turns denial into acceptance, chaos to order, confusion to clarity. It can turn a meal into a feast, a house into a home, a stranger into a friend. Gratitude makes sense of our past, brings peace for today, and creates a vision for tomorrow. – Melody Beattie

Everything in the universe goes by indirection. There are no straight lines. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

Restlessness and discontent are the first necessities of progress. — Thomas Edison

If you’re not confused, you’re not paying attention. — Tom Peters