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Digital-Detox

Could a regular day of downtime make you more productive?

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Could a regular day of downtime make you more productive?

Many UK adults spend an average of five hours a day looking at screens, sometimes more if they are at work.

However, a new event, called the Offline Club carried out a a 24-hour digital detox.

One participant, aged 33, had calculated that between working behind a desk all day and coming home to watch TV and “doomscroll” on social media, he can spend up to 14 hours a day looking at a screen.

The Offline Club held its first in-person “digital detox hangout” in Amsterdam in February. In the months since, the company has already expanded into Paris, Dubai and London.

Ilya Kneppelhout, the co-founder of the Offline Club, said people have been surprised at how just a few hours offline “made them feel so much less stressed and more connected to themselves and to others”.

Would a day free of screens refresh you and make you more productive?

Measuring-Productivity

Measuring productivity and why it is important

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In the current difficult economic climate how well a business is performing may be crucial to survival.

Measuring its productivity is therefore important.

Productivity is the measure of production against efficiency, and it is especially important in an era of remote or flexible working patterns.

According to Opus Energy, 86% of UK SMEs believe productivity is an issue, yet one in five (22%) businesses are not measuring productivity at all.

Measuring productivity is not a straightforward calculation of the numbers of items produced, the cost of production and the number of staff producing the item. That may be relatively straightforward for the manufacture of a product.

However, as an example, “One hour spent on the phone resolving a query from an unhappy customer could be worth a lot more than one new sales call. Why? An unhappy customer can do more damage to your business.

The key to measuring productivity is to set a number of benchmarks against which performance can be assessed.

This includes identifying expected work outputs for each position, defining and measuring tasks not hours worked, setting clear goals for staff and placing values on the quality of work.

There is a useful guide to assessing productivity for SMEs here.