Most U.S. workers say they feel rushed on the job, but they are getting less accomplished than a decade ago, according to newly released research.
Workers completed two-thirds of their work in an average day last year, down from about three-quarters in a 1994 study, according to research conducted for Day-Timers Inc., an East Texas, Pennsylvania-based maker of organizational products. . .
"Technology has sped everything up and, by speeding everything up, it's slowed everything down, paradoxically," said John Challenger, chief executive of Chicago-based outplacement consultants Challenger, Gray & Christmas Inc.
"We never concentrate on one task anymore. You take a little chip out of it, and then you're on to the next thing," Challenger said on Wednesday. "It's harder to feel like you're accomplishing something."
Link.
These types of studies fascinate me, probably because they have a McLuhan-esque taste. When a new technology like the Internet is introduced into the office, intelligent bosses probably predicted the obvious problems: people will be tempted to surf instead of work, tempted to send harassing emails, inclined to use the Internet shortcut instead of doing a job right.
But would they have predicted an inability to concentrate on one tast anymore? I doubt it. That's an unintended consequence of media, and every new media is full of unintended consequences.
Media, in fact, changes our entire mental landscape: how we view things, how we think. And not only do we not see it coming, we don't realize it after the shift is here (unless folks like McLuhan, Ong, and other tell us).
How shocked, for instance, would the bosses be if they discovered that the Internet caused people not to want to work at all? The constant draw to an infinite number of other possibilities shifted our thinking in a way that makes office work as a whole simply unthinkable?
I'm not saying the Internet does that, but it's conceivable, yet virtually no one thinks about such potential drastic shifts when embracing new media.
