You don’t need to be an economist to figure out that there are 168 hours in a week, 24 hours in a day or at least six hours in the day when you should be having a life.  So how come we don’t get more stuff done?  Our stuff that is, that is really important to us:  that we are measured on at work, or that is fundamental to our wellbeing. 
 
When I ask women what they would do with an extra hour in a day (yup, that means 25 hours) they say they’d just love to do the basics – read a book, exercise, relax with their kids, get on top of their personal admin, do some life planning, or even, just for once, do absolutely nothing apart from think.  How crazy is it that we can’t carve out time right now to do any of that?
 
Is it a coincidence that the UK’s productivity has declined over the last ten years, since that watershed date of June 29, 2007: the day Apple launched the first iPhone? I don’t think so. The solution to so many of our problems is also the cause of them.  Digitisation has layered extra work on top of our real work.  Our hours are getting longer whilst our outputs are fewer and our mental health and resilience diminish.

We are distracted by multiple channels, absorbed in bottomless news feeds, and interrupted constantly. Open plan offices don’t help.   It takes us about twenty minutes to get back on track after an interruption and the harder the task, the less likely we are to resume it. 
 
We do busy ‘fake’ work, dictated by our inbox not by our priorities: whatever is screaming out loudest in front of us gets done.
 
We have a counterproductive meeting culture and insane stakeholder demands.  How many times have you heard someone say that they are in ‘back to back meetings all day’, as if it is something to be proud of?