How Slack is costing you time, and your boss money

The report used an economic model that drew upon existing academic studies and a survey of knowledge workers to estimate the economic costs of lost focus in the workplace. It found the average knowledge worker loses 166 hours of focus time each year to unproductive work-related messages on platforms such as Slack and Teams.

These messages are the biggest drain on a knowledge worker’s attention in Australia, followed by personal activities such as social media and shopping (146 hours of focus time lost), unproductive work emails (82 hours lost), and unproductive work meetings (75 hours lost). They also spent an average of 131 hours each year returning to core activities after getting distracted.

All up, distractions cost the average knowledge worker an estimated 600 hours of stolen attention every year, compared to an average of 568 hours across the 10 developed economies studied. Only French workers were more distracted, losing 608 hours of focus time each year.

Researchers from Economist Impact put the subsequent annual cost for Australian businesses at $27,585 per employee, or the equivalent of 29 per cent of average baseline pay.

“The loss of focus, or unproductive periods, leads to missed opportunities for producing valuable work,” the researchers said.

“At a company level, deep focus is essential for producing valuable insights that can lead to improved products, services or processes – and thus higher profits.”

The report found that managers globally were more frequently distracted than those lower down the corporate ladder.

Economist Impact’s researchers said companies could sharpen their employees’ focus by providing them with the tools they needed to work remotely and ensuring their offices included quiet spaces that allowed for focused work.

They also recommended employers allow staff to carve out time in their calendars for focused work and empower them to schedule meeting-free periods.

‘Focus days’

Other recommendations included “providing workshops on focus skills to help workers overcome constant interruptions”, and “giving workers the flexibility to choose where they work best”.

“The more agency that workers have over their schedule and environment, the better outcomes they tend to see for focus, work quality and wellbeing,” the researchers said.

Pia Broadley, head of APAC sales for US file hosting service Dropbox, which commissioned the report, said a key finding of the research was that Australian knowledge workers could increase their gross value-added contribution by 44 per cent if they minimised distractions and optimised their focus time.

To that end, Dropbox encourages each of its teams to set “core collaboration hours” during which meetings and other team activities are permitted. These windows typically last for four hours, which allows employees to dedicate the other four working hours each day to uninterrupted, focused work.

Dropbox also enforces a company-wide “focus day” each month that is free from meetings and involves limited communications. Ms Broadley said these days were scheduled at the start of the year and typically fall on a Friday.

“We try and not distract one another, try and remove those messages from coming in on that day, and really focus on that deeper thought [and] focus time to be really productive,” she said.

The company also runs workshops on “the neuroscience of success” to help staff optimise their time and better understand the importance of taking breaks, among other things.

As for Mr Francis, he’s removed emails from his phone and blocked out “focus time” on his calendar to minimise distractions and carve out time for his top priorities.

“I’ve communicated this to everybody in my team locally – that if you see a block on my diary that says ‘focus time’, that just means that [I’m] researching or strategising for an [upcoming] meeting ... [so] don’t disturb me in any way,” he said, noting that exceptions are made for urgent calls.

“During that focus time, I make sure to mute all my notifications on all the communication channels and everything like that. And it really helps me sit down for those two hours and put my time where it’s needed.”

A spokeswoman for Slack said: “Employees today have access to more information, tools and people than ever before – but sometimes, it can get a bit noisy”.

She said it was ultimately up to employees and their leaders to set their own workplace norms and culture. But she said the work messaging platform had taken great care to “build courtesy and respect into our product, to make work more simple, pleasant and productive, and to help people focus their attention on what matters most”.

“Examples include scheduled send, custom [and] advanced notifications, built-in warnings about sending ‘noisy’ or outside of work hours messages [and] status messages,” the spokeswoman said.

For its own employees, she continued, the company enforces company-wide meeting free days and encourages employees to block off time in their calendar for “periods of deep work”.