Time wasters at work aren’t just a minor inconvenience — they’re a serious drain on your business’s productivity and bottom line.
For business leaders, the goal is to optimize every workday. With complicated workflows and asynchronous schedules, distractions chip away at time that could be better spent driving your business forward.
Understanding what constitutes a time waster is the first step in eliminating it. In this guide, we’ll discuss the most common time wasters in the workplace and share actionable strategies to eliminate existing time wasters and spot new ones before they become an issue.
Time wasters are day-to-day functions, occurrences, distractions, or bad habits that consume time that would otherwise be spent on working towards your goals. Examples might include tangible distractions like low-priority emails, unnecessary meetings, excessive breaks, or intangible qualities like perfectionism or procrastination.
Even if you and your team pride yourselves on being productive, you may still fall into some time-wasting activities at work.
Most of us struggle to maximize our work hours, as evidenced by statistics like these:
Despite the alarming statistics, you can boost team efficiency and eliminate time wasters to maximize your work time.
Employees waste time due to boredom, lack of focus, or bad habits. However, external factors such as distractions, unclear direction, inefficient workflows, and poor employee engagement can also lead to wasted time.
If you find that employees are wasting time at work, make sure to:
Time wasting costs companies billions. Work time lost to frequent distractions costs U.S. businesses an estimated $650 billion per year. On an individual level, the average employee can cost businesses thousands of dollars.
If time tracking goes unchecked, here are a few examples of the many costly consequences that lead to these jarring numbers:
These costly mistakes barely scratch the surface regarding the biggest time wasters. Let’s delve in and take a closer look.
There are always plenty of distractions, from the co-worker who constantly stops by to chat to the relentless pings of incoming emails. Interruptions sabotage your focus and productivity. Identifying your time wasters is your first step in minimizing them.
Let’s break down the most common time wasters so you can identify the traps you and your team might fall into.
Emails are necessary for workplace communication, but they can quickly become overwhelming and heavily affect workplace productivity.
Employees receive around 121 emails per day, and it’s estimated that 28% of work time is spent reading and responding to emails. This constant influx of messages interrupts focus and prolongs task completion times, making emails one of the most common time wasters.
Instant messaging platforms like Slack are integral for team communication, but can also be a significant source of distraction, often contributing to time wasted at work. Frequent pings can disrupt deep work, leading to a loss of focus and productivity.
Research shows that it takes an average of 23 minutes to refocus after an interruption, highlighting how instant messages can become one of the biggest time wasters in the workplace.
Hubstaff’s Insights can track time spent on messaging platforms, identifying areas for improvement and helping to avoid wasting time. Hubstaff’s productivity research found that
While essential, meetings can often become time wasters if they are not well-planned or too frequent. Many meetings lack a clear agenda, leading to unproductive discussions and contributing to the list of common workplace time wasters.
Employees spend over five hours per week in meetings, with 67% reporting that these meetings prevent them from doing their best work, making them one of the primary time wasters at work.
Doing two things at once doesn’t mean accomplishing two things at once.
While multitasking is often seen as a way to get more done, it actually decreases productivity by splitting focus and increasing the likelihood of errors, making it one of the more deceptive time wasters.
Multitasking can reduce productivity by up to 40%, as it takes longer to complete tasks and often results in lower-quality work. Engaging in multiple tasks simultaneously can make it harder to complete one task effectively.
Repetitive tasks like data entry or manual reporting can consume valuable time that could be better spent on more strategic activities, contributing significantly to time wasters in the workplace.
It’s estimated that the average worker spends about one workday each week on repetitive tasks that could be automated, highlighting their role as common workplace time wasters.
Social media is a major source of distraction in the workplace. While a quick check might seem harmless, it can easily turn into a prolonged session of browsing, making it one of the more challenging time wasters to control.
Employees spend an average of 1.5 hours per day on social media during work hours, which can add up to nearly a full workday each week, making it one of the most significant time wasters at work.
A cluttered workspace or disorganized digital files can lead to wasted time searching for documents or tools needed to complete a task, making disorganization one of the most common workplace time wasters.
Disorganization can cost employees 7.8 hours each week, as they struggle to find the information they need to do their jobs effectively, contributing significantly to time wasters at work.
Without proper planning, employees may spend too much time deciding what to do next, leading to inefficiency and missed deadlines, which is one of the more subtle but impactful time wasters at work.
Employees without a clear plan can lose hours each week due to indecision and lack of direction, turning what could be productive time into one of the more prevalent time wasters.
Remote work invites a whole new share of challenges. Work from home distractions ranging from household chores, TV, video games, and doctor’s appointments can make otherwise productive workers distracted.
Home-related distractions like family, pets, roommates, and multitasking on chores can have a significant impact on productivity. These distractions can also have negative affects on productivity and quality of work if left unchecked.
Oftentimes, time wasting at work is well-intentioned. In other words, employees may be struggling to use their time effectively due to outdated or ineffective software. If you find multiple team members consistently missing deadlines or delivering subpar work, you may need to look at the technology you’re using and the workflows you’ve built.
In remote and hybrid environments especially, modern workforces rely on software to achieve their day-to-day responsibilities. These days, gaps and inefficiencies in one’s tech stack make it next to impossible to hit deadlines and produce one’s best work.
Identifying time wasters is important for saving businesses time, money, and peace of mind. Time-wasting activities like unnecessary meetings, inefficient workflows, and unclear priorities can also negatively impact employee morale and lead to burnout and high turnover.
By understanding how your time is spent, you can empower your team to be more efficient and productive—without making them feel pressured.
Here are a few ways to stop employees from wasting time at work.
With a time tracking software with workforce management solutions, you can gain insights into how your team works so you can better manage employee time and engagement.
At Hubstaff, we know how important it is to get detailed insights into how your team works, so we created our Insights add-on. With Insights, you can measure your workforce productivity with performance management features and compare it with industry benchmarks.
With workforce analytics, it’s easy to delegate tasks and ensure your team doesn’t lose focus. Integrate your favorite project management system and assign tasks to your team so they can track time to them.
It’s hard to use your time more efficiently if you don’t know how to use it now.
That’s why time tracking and productivity software are so helpful. With app and URL tracking, apps like Hubstaff will give you and your team a detailed picture of where your time is going.
Often, there’s a big difference between what you remember doing during the day and what the recorded time tracking data shows. You might think you only spent 20 minutes browsing social media yesterday, but the report indicates that it was more like 95 minutes.
Like every 12-step program says, admitting you have a problem is the first step.
Worried that your team will buck against this type of monitoring? That’s a valid concern. And 79% of employees say it’s okay for their employers to monitor their work-related tasks.
It’s also a good idea to consider how you implement employee monitoring for the best possible results.
At Hubstaff, we highly stress the importance of getting employee buy-in for sustained time tracking success. When you approach time tracking as a group effort and welcome feedback from your employees, you’ll be more likely to get employees to track time — and see less resistance in the process.
You know firsthand that getting into a flow state is challenging when interrupted.
Do your team a favor by leaving enough time for focused, deep work.
You can schedule a team-wide, meeting-free block of time or designate a specific day with no meetings allowed. Encourage people to block off time on their calendars for uninterrupted work.
If you work in an office, you and your team might want to decide on a signal (like wearing headphones) that lets other people know you’re zoned in and shouldn’t be interrupted. For remote teams, do-not-disturb mode is your friend.
Say so long to the meetings that should’ve been emails.
Consider establishing virtual meeting best practices, like requiring every meeting to have an agenda, so your team needs to think clearly about what they want to cover. You’ll use the time more wisely and cut down on unnecessary attendance.
With a roadmap for every meeting, you have productive conversations rather than bull sessions.
Have a goal in mind, and handle all your brainstorming and ideation beforehand.
This will remove a lot of unproductive meetings from your calendar. You’ll identify topics that can easily be covered in an email and cancel anything that isn’t ready for a group discussion yet.
Say “so long” to the meetings that should’ve been emails.
Don’t waste your team’s brilliance on easily automated tasks. Provide tools that can automatically handle some of their most time-consuming to-dos.
Zapier and IFTTT are popular solutions that link apps and automate basic tasks. Agile project management software can easily automate workflows and move work forward with a single click.
You can also look to tools like Hubstaff to streamline time tracking, payroll, invoicing, and other processes to help your business run more efficiently. You can also use it to spot time wasters with built-in employee productivity features like:
Real-life time wasters may include things like outside noise, workplace gossip, or unproductive meetings. For remote workers, these distractions may also involve family, pets, disorganized schedules, and general inefficient work habits like procrastination and multitasking.
Losing time and money to time-wasters is frustrating and harmful to the future of your business, but you can take control.
With Hubstaff’s time tracking tools with built-in employee productivity monitoring, you can:
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