These lockdown activities have cost us the most 'wasted' time
For a lot of people, productivity hasn’t gone hand in hand with lockdown. But with New Year’s resolutions in full swing, searches for ‘productivity’ have gone up 150% in the last three weeks.
In light of this, Reboot Digital PR Company have conducted a survey of 2,456 Brits to find out which lockdown activities have cost them the most ‘wasted’ time. They asked people what they’d been up to in an average week over the last 296 days since lockdown began in Britain and found we’ve spent more than 20% of our time on certain time-wasting activities.
Brits’ biggest time wasters:
Our biggest timewaster was procrastinating when working from home with Brits admitting they spend an average of 2 hours and 35 minutes EVERYDAY procrastinating! Based on a 5-day work week, that’s a total of 32,239 minutes, or 537 hours just sitting around thinking about work. Believe it or not, this is only around 30 minutes more than average work-day procrastination!
Netflix also didn’t help Brits’ productivity as watching shows we’ve already watched before accounted for 16% of our wasted time. The most popular shows re-watched included Tiger King (5 hours 17 mins), The Crown (28 hours 58 mins), Sherlock (19 hours 30 mins) and The Walking Dead (146 hours) – a total of 11,985 minutes. This comes after a study from BroadBandDeals.com revealed that Friends is the TV show fans love to re-watch the most – 63% of viewers have replayed the series after completing it!
‘Browsing’ in general cost us 12,221 minutes of our lockdown time. We spent 105 hours browsing non-essential shops online and 98 hours browsing our own fridges and cupboards – all without buying or eating anything!
Other interesting results:
Banana mania: We spent around 46 hours baking banana bread that we didn’t even want (or that turned out inedible!).
Brits spent roughly the same amount of time getting dressed up to take selfies as we took to recover from online workouts - 84 hours respectively since lockdown began.
Let’s not forget the time we spent video calling relatives – Reboot Digital PR found that we spent around 506 minutes of lockdown helping grandparents set up video calls. From getting their audio working to teaching them how to make their screen a gallery, we became the tech gurus they’ve always seen us as!
Essential shopping took us longer than normal too. We spent a combined total of nearly 3,000 minutes trying to book an online delivery slot or queueing at supermarkets. That was 28 hours spent trying to book an online delivery slot, and 21 hours queueing at supermarkets.
Least time spent:
Get that man some syrup! Brits wasted a whopping 527 minutes (9 hours) waiting for Boris to stop with the waffle. Either delaying speeches or just avoiding the important bits, this is something that grinded Brits’ gears most!
Buzzword phrases like “You’re on mute!” and “Can you mute yourself?” took up around 148 minutes or 2 and a half hours of the average Brit’s lockdown. We said, “You’re on mute” around 39 times a week, and “Can you mute yourself?” 23 times a week – fortunately, they don’t take much time to say!
