to be surprised at how slowly people work?

[seoid]

I work 24 hours a month, so essentially three working days. In that time I produce almost an entire 24-page magazine from scratch, including sourcing, editing and laying up articles and writing about 3,000 words. Within that time I also MN a bit and go on facebook. I can be a bit stressed coming up to deadline but mostly it's fine, easy to do.

I've always been quite hard on myself, but actually I'm realising that many of the people I've worked with have been incredibly slow in comparison to me. Does anyone else find this? I've always thought I'm a fairly average worker but actually as time goes on I'm finding that simply getting the job done actually puts me a fair bit ahead of the people I work with, who seem to faff and miss deadlines and be totally unreliable. I had a meeting with our new CEO yesterday and he was full of praise for me, which was nice. Once I would have been surprised at his praise and felt a bit of a fraud but actually now I think there is quite a high level of incompetence out there, such that if you actually know what you're doing and get it done then you're already ahead of the game.

AIBU?

Stuff that needs doing around the house? I don't include dusting and polishing in that.

No you are right OP some people just take fucking AGES to do things.

I have baby friends who say that hey can't do the housework with a baby and their houses are a shithole. Putting a load of washing on/loading the dishwasher/picking toys up/ emptying dishwasher/making a pile if paper work are all five minute tasks and I am by no means house proud, clean, or tidy but even I manage to get some of these things done ever with two small children around.

internet shopping takes ten minutes. Putting it away takes ten.

even if you are carrying a baby around with you ALL DAY you can move things around to make it easy to tidy. I have never ever bought the "I couldn't even wee" Because you CAN put them down even if they are screaming you just choose not to!!!!
and also, babies need floor time! And tummy time!!!!

But I digress. I can do the same job as people around me who have to take work home and are constantly behind because I plan my time and keep on top of admin as well as my work.

I also don't sit talking about my boring life to anyone who will listen, I will happily chat whilst doing work and talk to friends in the kitchen etc, but I have worked with people who literally spend ALL DAY talking and then moan constantly about how busy they are and how unfair the workload is.

Try eating your breakfast at home rather than spending half an hour dicking about making porridge at work you lazy cow!

Also, people who browse holiday sites in full view of everyone and then claim how busy they are. Fuck off!!!!

Different jobs require different skill sets. DH is very meticulous. This is very useful in his job (coder) but not so good at home (I can clear up after a meal in under half an hour, he'll take 2). He drives me insane with his inability to respond speedily to something.

I'm a scientist but in contract work so we work fast but have to be accurate and record everything we do. We spend a lot of time working on improving efficiency to allow us to do this. Even so some people are quicker workers than others, generally most of the staff in my group are fab, the ones who are slower are either a bit flakey (the kind who sit about chatting) or get easily stressed and so waste time over preparing or being excessively thoughtful when analysing their data. We can put people on different projects that best suit their skill set but even the fastest workers can't keep it up 37 hours a week and some downtime is necessary. Chatting while having cake or in offices has a role in sharing learning from projects and makes collaboration easier.

I think that only working 24 hours a month would feel like a hobby so it's much easier to stay focused and motivated. You don't have to deal with endless admin crap that gets in the way of actually doing your job. Full time work is actually quite tiring, especially if add in commutes

3000 words is like banging out an essay each month so doable - I presume you're writing about a subject that's relatively familiar and not researching whole new areas from scratch? If you are and the quality is good, that's quite impressive

i wonder if you went at it full tilt for 40 hours, would you burn out? Or learn to pace yourself. not to the point of wasting time, but I suppose you would have more tasks beyond this one project, with more abstract steps and malleable deadlines.

Every job I have had, I have found the elements requiring actual production, creation, throughput of data, and/or a deadline to be much easier to put my head down and accomplish compared to the follow-up closing out of projects, filing, distribution (to people who likely wont read it anyway), filling out of forms . I tried to treat such things as projects, but such tasksere generally done 'in-between' real projects and never get completely done before the same stuff for the next project comes along.

I've had to learn to slow down to some extent in my current role, not in all aspects of my job but in certain ones. When I was a temp I worked at the speed of light but this job is different. I'm working with older people, some very elderly, and I'm talking to them about things they have never had to think about before. They are usually very intelligent and canny but I'm introducing a whole lot of new concepts while the person is quite ill. There is absolutely no point in rushing them - if I spend 45 minutes with that person now, the chances are that they will need fewer appointments in the future and that the rest will go better.

Likewise, I used to whiz onto the wards and whip through the information I needed to look at and just found I missed stuff - it's true that others can do it faster but I can't. I'm working full days, full time on four different hospital sites and I need to take myself through the stages until I understand what I'm looking at. I could certainly be more efficient but I also have to allow myself to be human and an individual.

I agree with Scrumbled. It's also worth considering that, when you're in an organisation, part of your work is about maintaining that organisation -- building relationships with co-workers, communicating with all sorts of people, having lunch, chatting at the water-cooler, sharing jokes, to say nothing of management and teamwork tasks. This is all legitimate organisational work and without it there is just a load of individuals coming in, doing their thing, and getting out again.

I admit that I'm freelance and love the fact that I can avoid pointless meetings and managing people, but I still have to do aspects of organisational work in order to keep my clients and win more. I'm very good at what I do ... but if I only did that it would probably all fall apart.

Is there a correlation between how fast you work and how fast you do chores? I can whizz through food shopping, cleaning, washing-up, etc. and also my work tasks. I don't waste time prevaricating though nor do I gossip much

I think so. I work 30 hours a week but carry a full time caseload and i am one of the only people in my office who ever seems to have time to help others out. But they seem to spend hours poncing around wirh and organising unmanageably long colour coordinated electronic diarised task lists while i just have a scrappy to do list on paper.

Dh is permanently amazed at how quickly i rattle through cooking, ironing, housework etc

Everything i do is done at speed :D

Well it depends on intelligence, aptitude etc. but I think YANBU in general

In my work some colleagues work massively long hours. I tend not do (excluding travel) but will if I need to. I have noticed that some simple tasks I turn around so much quicker.

All though in some ways I'm my own worst enemy. I'm a programme manager and it's bloody hard to estimate other people's time for simple tasks like creating a steering pack when you can turn it around in 30 mins, but they might take 2hrs.

I've been doing this job for years and I'm actually very understanding with my teams, but I find estimating for management and to a lesser extent admin tasks bloody difficult because I know that for me a particular admin task might be 30mins actual work, a couple of emails and 20 mins of faffing. It's hard to get my head around how people can take so bloody long, but I've worked beside them and they do without obviously faffing around.

Although spot the typos

I am incredibly quick, but I am a shit proof reader. At my grade and in my organisation this is accepted if I produce something quickly. In previous roles this would have been leapt upon so I would have got less done.

Albeit now I have handy people who are detail oriented (finance and IT) who just notice this shit. It's great - we work to our strengths & turning things around quickly is one of mine, but I appreciate my detail oriented / completer-finisher colleagues

I agree I couldn't sustain the same level of working if I was doing it fulltime - working part time certainly helps. But even in fulltime jobs I noticed that others struggled to get quite basic tasks completed - stuff that required no skill, just graft, like putting away files. I would just go and do it and have it done in 15 minutes, others seemed to faff and procrastinate and never get it done.

In terms of breakdown of tasks, I spend about an hour editing each of four 1400 word articles, an hour setting up an ad for our journal (detailing current articles), 4 hours writing the 3000 words, 2 hours dropping in and editing columns/pieces from other contributors, 1 hour on the events pages, and about 3 hours proof reading and final editing. The rest of the time is spent on emails, filing, sourcing articles, attending conferences (though these can cause me to go over the 24 hours, and that's allowed in my contract) and admin. SwedishEdith - the stuff I write about basically involves researching and gathering various news stories on particular topics, giving an overview and writing about it from a particular angle relevant to the magazine. So it involves a bit of research but it's not like I'm writing an in-depth literature review or anything like that.

It's certainly not the case that I skim over detail - editing is all about detail, in fact it's about nothing else really! Quality isn't an issue - the CEO was very happy with my work.

With housework, I say I can tidy the house in half an hour not because I do a shit job but because at any one moment there is rarely more than half an hour to do. That's because I tidy as I go, constantly, so it's rare that there is a pile of work to do all at once.

I've done roughly similar work, and I'd say - yes, it's entirely possible to work at that rate for a short period (usually with a fiercely looming deadline for me!) but not full-time. Also, there doesn't seem to be much 'waiting for the client' time in there, which is definitely one of the biggest time-sucks in most similar lines of work.

But you do sound fast too.

Of course, withoug seeing your layouts and copy we can't judge if you're a creative genius or spending 3 days producing something that looks like my MIL's parish newsletter .

Ha, Twelve, I won't be winning the Pulitzer any time soon but it's not too bad!

I'd actually like to do more with it, and am wangling that at the moment.

What aermingers said really.

Sorry but a lot of pp sound inexperienced or unaware. A team needs different skills and different working styles. A lot can be learned from your older, apparently infuriatingly slow colleagues - importantly, how to maintain working relationships with other people. Also if you are a temp you've probably been given self-contained, simple, safe tasks, so it's easy to power through. In large organisations long processes can be unavoidable - public sector statutory stuff might look like pointless red tape to the untrained eye. Accuracy is more important than speed in many jobs.

Also at so many people admitting to use the internet during work hours.

I find the actual topics discussed here really interesting, but I am completely distracted because -- have I gathered correctly that for people in the UK a FT job is 37 hours a week and you get 5 weeks of vacation a year??

Yes - and it can be more. I work in a university and full timers get 30 days plus 8 days statutory bank holidays.

I came from the private sector and have trouble using it all!

I work quickly and efficiently through most tasks. I can figure out new skills fast and do a good job.

I still dont understand how people clean their homes in a morning. It takes me two hours to hoover from top to bottom. By the time I have lifted the beds, moved the sofas etc to clean under them.

Then you have surfaces, windows, kitchen, bathrooms, beds, cupboards. I just dont see how it can all be done in such a short amount of time.

I get 6 weeks plus statutory, and work 36 hours a week. I've had to go part time for health reasons a couple of times and I swear I get as much done because I have to be so much more focused.

i work in a team of two of us.

I start around 9 and finish around 6, most days. During that time I intersperse periods of intense work with, frankly, skiving off and doing my own thing.

She gets in at 6.30am everyday, finishes at 7-8pm,and often comes in at weekend as well, and I'm pretty sure she is actually working that whole time.

She doesn't get as much done as I do. Boss is very happy with my productivity. He's another very slow worker. I can whack something out in a couple of hours, and it's good, not bodged together, and he'll look at it and be very pleased and say 'oooh this must have taken you hours!'.

Slow, slow, slow. Drives me bonkers, I don't understand HOW people do things so slowly, I would die of boredom. I can do in 10 or 15 minutes what it will take them an hour to do.

MissYamabuki I think you're missing the point slightly. I'm referring to people that work incredibly slowly to produce either nothing or shit, after the deadline. No organisation needs people who just don't get the work done.

I'm not the only one then I've been the same since I started working when I was 16 any job I've done I've always completed my work what ever it was before any one else even those that had been working in the company's for years when I was new to the job.

I'm very easy going on every else but very hard on myself(as my Mother used to say I would always be my own worst critic)that's most probably why we work so quickly we push ourselves.

I'm the same with everything not just work,cooking,cleaning,gardening,sorting things for the children.My poor DH can't keep up.I must admit it can make me impatient as I think everyone else is going slowly when in reality it most probably is just me going really quick.I've learned to bite my tongue and not comment on how long somethings taking.

I do think it's easier to do more work in a fraction of a job than you'd expect from a straight multiple up to full time hours. Especially the sort of work which is helped by having time to sleep on it, to daydream a bit about what you want it to look like, and so on. You probably don't do any of those things in your working hours, but someone who worked full time would have to.

I only write for fun, but a lot of my ideas and even my wording come to me while I'm doing something else entirely.

Also when you're on minimal hours you tend not to get asked to drop it to do anything else.

I work half time, but get assigned 60% of the work that the full-timers get. That's fine - I'm not expected to be on any of the daily rotas (since I'm not there daily) and I know they take up a significant chunk of people's working weeks when they're "on" that week.

37.5 hours here Keats and 33 days holiday so that's 6.5 weeks, plus bank holidays :)

Good heavens.

FIVE WEEKS .... SIX POINT FIVE WEEKS ....