Saturday 9:38am: Reading Jill’s Bridget Jones-writealike blog entry. Fun, reminds me of Umberto Eco’s piece about time spent on research (from How to travel with a salmon), where he (if memory serves me right) proves that as a professor of linguistics, he had 1 hour per year or so for research. Especially liked the entry on “Head of Department can decide less teaching for self”, followed by “Head of Department realizes resource contraints and find she has to teach anyway.”
Aside from that, I remember a study done at American Airlines in the early 90s, about white-collar productivity. The idea was that about 40% of people’s time was spent unproductively, doing things such as unproductive meetings, waiting for the copying machine etc. The company was investing in office automation, and wanted justify it by decreasing unroductive time by using computers to automate boring stuff, so people could concentrate on the core part of their job. Disappointing results, though people liked email and an integrated work platform. And spent as much time as before being “unproductive”.
Seems we humans have a need for some time in slow gear doing busywork. Such as blogging. And she might have a book in this…..