Digital clutter is weighing you down

The average employee spends a staggering 29 days a year searching through digital clutter for the information they need

IT’S SPRING, AND that means dealing with clutter. And while we hate to add to the list, consider taking an hour out of your day to do some spring cleaning for your files, as well.

Click here to view this article in the London Inc. Worklife newsletter

A survey that came out last month from software company Smallpdf found that digital clutter can be a sneaky little time water. According to their survey, the average employee spends just under an hour every day searching for emails, files and links that are lost in the digital torrent.

Story Continues Below

 

“Digital disorganization has quietly become one of the biggest drains on focus and productivity,” they wrote. “The constant cycle of searching, sorting and reopening the same documents or emails adds up to a staggering loss of time every year.” By their estimates, 29 total workdays each year are lost to the task of trying to find something you saved, somewhere.

Classic economic laws have made some of this possible. Digital storage has decreased significantly in price, and the cost of storing something, anything, is now more marginal than it was in the past, resulting in yet more clutter. “This situation causes the amount of stored information to increase exponentially, and causes many problems caused by digital complexity,” another study found. “Since accumulating digital assets does not create a physical space narrowing, individuals do not realize that their savings turn into big garbage rather than big data over time.”

Story Continues Below

 

“In many workplaces, it’s not just one big mess but hundreds of small ones that people constantly double-check and search throughout the day,” said Fineas Tatar, speaking to The Globe and Mail. “Constant context switching can affect focus, risk errors and make simple tasks more exhausting.”

While they hold deep enmity towards each other at other times, though, millennials and Boomers can celebrate together over the fact that neither are the worst offenders here, according to Smallpdf. Millennials may have other problems, but we spend the least amount of time looking for files compared to Gen Z and Gen X, who cite misplaced files and inbox overload as the two top pain points, respectively. Kieran Delamont