Time Management Statistics You Need to Know

While you can be in utter shock when checking some time management statistics that reveal how you’re wasting your time, you also get essential intel to make your work days more efficient.

We all want to include time for meaningful personal activities during our busy work week while leveraging every second while, of course, keeping our work-life balance. That can happen if we understand our ground zero: how we spend our time, what’s hindering our productivity, and what helps us be super productive.

The time management statistics I’ve included in this article might help you define and start progressing much further from this starting point.

Time management statistics: Intro

The main objective of time management is to track time spent on tasks, optimize it, and achieve your goals faster. It’s hard to be a good time manager. Maybe it’s one of the hardest things we have to deal with, but its impact on your life satisfaction and decrease in work hours is considerable. I could have started this article with a shocker factor, like:

Did you know employees spend 57% of their time communicating? That means admin activities like emails, participating in calls, comms with colleagues, etc. But I think you might already be aware of some of the poor time management skills many employees have, maybe even you.

So, I’ll start by showing you where good time management skills lead, namely, the benefits of a good relationship with time.

• Recommended read: Time management goals

Time management statistics: The good side

Good time management can make a world of difference in your life, both personal and professional. We’re all complaining way too often about being busy and not having enough time to do what fills out cups.

So, let’s understand the good side of time management and the benefits it brings.

• Businesses that encourage employees to track their time more effectively can see revenue increases of up to 61%. (Accelo)

• Employees can save up to 40 hours per month by managing interruptions. (Jobera)​

• 83% of people believe time management will improve their decision-making abilities. (TimeWatch)

• Investing 10-12 minutes in planning your day can save up to two hours of your time. “Eat the Frog” by Brian Tracy.​

• 86% of people believe they would have better task attention if they had better time management skills. (Zoomshift)​

• Companies lose about $65 billion due to employee sleep deprivation, which can be mitigated by better time management (MarketSplash)​

• 76% of participants in a Q1 2022 poll said that they would dedicate 15-30 minutes daily to save 90 minutes and improve their work reputation (VPN Alert)​.

Time management statistics: The current state

Still, what is the current status quo at work? Do employees waste time? Do they rely on a proper time management system? Do they manage to finalize important tasks at the end of a working day?

The current reality, unfortunately, is that most working people don’t have an effective time management system, and they are more susceptible to distractions and procrastination. At the same time, just dealing with events and things as they happen is not a successful time management technique, leading to workers feeling out of control regarding workdays.

Let’s check some time management statistics on this topic:

• 20% of adults are chronic procrastinators, something to be aware of when trying to improve productivity. (The American Psychological Association);

• Having a proper time management system is key and might counterbalance the colossal 20% mentioned above, but according to data from the job searcher tool Zippia, 82% of people don’t have one.

• The average worker spends around 51% of every workday on tasks with low to no value impact, not knowing that spending only 10 minutes a day planning the day can save two hours.

Good time management starts with a good time tracking solution

“We have become 20% more profitable because everyone is in the habit of time tracking.” – Richard Wingfield, Head Geek at Envision Design

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• Only 20% of workers manage daily stress while feeling good about it, and feel like they have their workload under control daily.

• In the United States, distractions at work cost businesses around 588 billion dollars yearly, according to the research presented by Zippia.

Time management statistics: Meetings that could have been an e-mail

Meetings, while sometimes pivotal in collaboration and communication, significantly impact time management if not properly handled. Frequent or poorly organized meetings consume valuable work hours and disrupt employee’s workflow and productivity.

You might be amazed at the negative effects poorly organized meetings have on the profitability and effectiveness of employees. Building time management systems for meetings can have substantial consequences on your business.

• Time management research at an MIT study stated that the average person spends about 16% of a lifetime of work in useless meetings. This represents approximately 22 years of a 45-year career. It’s a lot of time spent on “meetings that could’ve been an e-mail,” as pop culture refers to it, with no value added to the work they have to perform.

• Professionals spend approximately 5 hours and 6 minutes per week in meetings and nearly 4 hours preparing for them, totaling almost 10 hours weekly dedicated solely to meetings (Flowtrace)​

• 10,6% of people equate meetings with distraction to their “real work,” which causes a lot of wasted time in their average workday. (Udemy)

• Inefficient meetings cause an estimated $37 billion loss annually in the U.S. (Discoveryaba)

Time management statistics: E-mails are not harmless either

• However, e-mails are not exactly innocent in poor time management. According to an analysis by the McKinsey Global Institute, on average, 28% of work time is spent reading or replying to emails.

• The average worker checks email 11 times per hour on average.

• 84% of employees keep their email in the background while working.

• 90% of the average worker checks work messaging tools such as Slack or Teams for up to 5 hours daily. (Zapier)

• 31% of people open their emails when the email notification appears. (TimeWatch)

• People check their email every hour and 40 minutes on average. This depends, however, on how vital emails are in their job. (Development Academy)

• Forbes states that an office worker spends 2.5 hours daily doing email-related things, with around 1.8 hours on irrelevant communications. This constant distraction prevents the worker from engaging in meaningful thinking. 

• Every company that’s billing time fails to bill 700 hours annually due to employees wrongly (or not at all) tracking time spent on email or in meetings. (Affinity Live)

Time management done right: Methods and techniques

While time management contributes massively to reduced stress and burnout, 70% of workers without any time management method do not feel in control of their workload (Jobera). Without a proper system to manage time, just as the above stats prove, anyone from the average employee to college students procrastinate, and fill their time with wasters or distractions.

Let’s check out some of the stats on time management:

• When surveying 500 workers from different industries, Acuity Training, a UK-based IT education and training company, revealed that out of 18% of people who use time management methods, the average person tries 13 different time management methods.

Acuity Training reached the following conclusions:

• The Eisenhower Matrix is the most successful strategy: 50% of people who took part in the survey and who use the Eisenhower Matrix feel their work is under control every single day. This method helps you prioritize tasks based on levels of urgency and importance. Something can be urgent and important, not urgent but still important, not important but urgent, or not urgent and not necessary. 

• The Pomodoro Technique is the second most successful time management strategy: 60% of people using a Pomodoro timer technique feel that their work is under control from four to five days a week. The Pomodoro technique is commonly used to prevent distractions.

Every person is different, and the time management method that works for someone might not work for another person. It takes some time to find the perfect fit, and it’s good that most people try several methods before finding the right one.

Boost your productivity with one of the best time management methods.

Time management statistics: Time wasters

Time wasters are ways in which we procrastinate and do no-value tasks. Going back to Zippia’s research, the average corporate employee spends 51% of every workday on low to no-value tasks.

What are no-value tasks? Some examples of these are commuting, unnecessary meetings, unnecessary e-mails, and too much time spent on social media. Let’s see some stats related to wasted time.

• According to the United States Census Bureau, in 2018, the average commute to work (one way) took a worker 27 minutes.

• The above scenario has changed with the effects of the pandemic and the rise of remote work, but it’s worth noting that just before 2020, the average American worker spent nine working days of the year commuting.

• The average employee spends 12% of their working hours on a daily basis using social media productively. (Zippia)

• They also spend an average of 2 hours and 11 minutes procrastinating daily. (Zippia)

“Timeular has been a game changer. It has helped me develop a discipline for being mindful of my time and really understanding the value of it so I get more done.”

Jenny Blackett, working remotely as a software engineer

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After the imposed COVID-19 lockdowns, many companies decided to keep remote or hybrid positions as consistently as possible since commuting to an office job is wasted. Longer commutes can be bad for workers, their families, their employers, and the economy as a whole.

Time is also wasted on social media. Zippia’s research tells us that the average employee spends 12% of their working hours daily using social media productively. Over one week, this means that over 10 hours (of the average 40-hour work week) are lost. This is one-fourth of the total time an employee is “on the clock”.

According to a survey from NetQuote, workers waste most of their time on these social media websites:

• YouTube ( average of 16.98 days per year)

• Facebook (average of 14.70 days per year)

• Instagram (average of 8.72 days per year)

• Twitter (average 5.91 days per year)

However, while easy to blame, the internet and social media are not the only culprits of wasting time at work.

• Employees are not aware of this factor, but around 45 minutes per day are wasted because of unorganized workspaces. This translates into more than 4 hours a week. This is all about the time spent looking for lost papers and files. A messy space is very distracting and contributes to work stress, contributing to poor time management.

• Adding to that and piggybacking from something we presented above, workplace distractions cost each employee an average of 3 hours per day. That means that every month, 60 hours are wasted in this way.

TIP: Read our blog to discover all the benefits of time management.

Some examples of workplace distractions are spending too much time chatting with coworkers, getting coffee, attending workplace celebrations, or extended lunch hours. Not that these events aren’t beneficial on occasion, but they can take a toll on the work day that is hard to recover from. 

Time management statistics: Time tracking apps

Distractions and low to no-value tasks are very hurtful to productivity and raise business costs. What can these statistics teach us?

The average work day is 8 hours long, and from that, more than half of this time is wasted every single day. Only 4 hours of each day are productive.

How do you turn this around without making workers feel like they are being controlled? It’s all about finding a balance between the need to increase productivity and the wish to reduce stress-driven work days.

As stated above, the average person tries 13 different time management methods, but it is worth the research. Not every time management technique is equal, and certain industries can even develop their very own.

• Nearly 90% of workers admit to wasting time while on the clock. This ranges from a mere 30 minutes to some admitting to wasting closer to 3 hours daily in conversations, breaks, or online (elearningindustry.com)

• Time tracking data shows that the US economy loses 50 million hours of productivity per day due to unrecorded work tasks. Unrecorded emails alone can cost up to $50,000 annually.

• 38% of US employees report that they’re using paper timesheets and punch cards, which leads to wasting time and productivity drain.

• Deloitte reports that 50% of professionals who don’t use automated time-tracking systems report that manual data input is one of the most time-consuming activities they have to perform every da

• 93% of US employees report that their paychecks are delivered on time thanks to time management tools.

• 73% of businesses express high levels of satisfaction with the impact they had from automating their processes and tools.

You and your team spend 71.5% of our year at work

Make sure your time is well spent by tracking and managing it with automatic time-tracking apps.

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Productivity and automated time-tracking software have a big impact in tweaking the above time management statistics due to the following:

• It’s a good way to overcome procrastination;

• Tracking time spent on productive tasks, as well as on unproductive ones, to gather data and avoid this trend turns into a habit;

• Generating statistics on where departments are logging their working hours;

• Measuring productivity and comparing your team’s results over time;

• Setting hourly limits to reduce burnout and overtime costs;

• Avoiding too much time spent on low and no-value tasks;

• Setting budgets on tasks or projects and being alerted when the team gets close to going over budget;

• Generating detailed reports that show how workers spend time at work.

Find how Timeular helps your business or team increase productivity and profitability.

Conclusion

The statistics presented throughout the article are an eye-opener in terms of the impact of time management on productivity.

The knee-jerk reaction of many managers is to promote more discipline to capture the lost time. Yes, everyone can admit they could do better, but the fundamental problem is not the worker’s motivation.

Using outdated methods of time management or not even having one in place doesn’t help the workers.

Time is the most precious resource of all time, and by promoting time management habits, a person can end up saving two hours, daily. It also contributes to avoiding adverse outcomes like missing deadlines and getting stressed out at work. 

When time is structured, people are more deliberate in how they spend this finite resource.

They get things done and feel satisfied and good about their productivity levels. This is the ultimate benefit of good and effective time management.

Read also: How to teach time management

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