Xavier Bishop

You know, 8 hours is a significant amount of time. It’s one-third of an entire day.  As a workday 8 hours appears to be ample time to get things done. But I figured out that on any given workday roughly 70 percent of my time is spent meeting with someone in one of two ways: either face-to-face or over the phone. Factor in text messages and emails and that number increases by another 10 percent.  Include memos, letters and faxes, and you add another 10 percent to the total.

So 95 percent of my day is spent communicating with people in one way or another.  How’s the other 5 percent of my day spent? Well 4 percent is spent traveling to/from meetings, reading correspondence (oftentimes about meetings) and deciding whether I should schedule and/or attend a particular meeting. 

That leaves one percent - one hour out of every one hundred, 15 minutes out of every 25 hours, or roughly 5 minutes of an 8-hour workday – as the amount of time I have left to actually get work done, to accomplish some of the things that get discussed at all of those meetings.