What Do You Have in Common with Bill Gates?
Improving productivity starts from within | By: Sabrina Thomas | October 29, 2019
Unless we were all at some point the richest man/woman in the world for almost two decades, there is not much we could have in common with someone like Bill Gates, American business magnate, investor, author, philanthropist, and humanitarian. However, there is one thing that you, me, and everyone else in the world has in common with this very successful man. What is it? Time.
We all have time. What separates us from Bill Gates time-wise is how we choose to spend it. Are we doing everything we can to make sure we are productive, especially in the workplace? Or do we tend to get a little distracted?
According to this poll from Gallup, about 70 percent of U.S. workers are disengaged from their workday. Gallup shows that disengagement from work is caused by such things as the usage of smartphones, emails and social media. When it comes to emails, an average worker spends thirteen hours per week looking through and responding to emails. Ninety-six percent of workers even say that junk email distracts them far too often while doing their job.
As social media is growing more and more each day, it’s popularity is coming with a cost to productivity. According to this study, out of the 44 percent of employees who blamed the internet for killing their productivity, 36 percent said social media always impedes their workflow. This number will grow steadily as time goes on and social media reaches more audiences.
Not only this, but another study states that up to 10 minutes per day, per employee, is lost due to being late, long lunches and leaving early. By first glance, this may not seem like a huge deal, but think again. If six employees are reaching that 10 daily minutes of unproductivity, that is an hour of time a business cannot get back.
These statistics should be considered a sign that there needs to be change. Each of these polls are as recent as 2017, but the percentages of unproductivity are only increasing. So how do we make ourselves more productive?
A great source to find ways to help manage our time so we can be fully productive is this video titled “15 Ways To Improve Productivity” by a website used to motivate aspiring entrepreneurs. It goes over step-by-step ways to help us start and end our day with the most productivity we can, starting from within ourselves. Some examples were creating specific to-do lists the night before, restricting and recording time used on social medias and emails, getting rid of multi-tasking, and more. The video explains that doing these little things will start to form good habits that will eventually lead to the better usage of our time.
If we learn how to manage our time wisely, we could become the next Bill Gates, a man that was known for holding three minute business meetings to save the most amount of time possible for productivity. Well, that may be a stretch, but at least we could be more successful and strive for the same productivity that he did.