Well, your intuition is probably right.
Microsoft recently published its 2023 Work Trend Index report. It includes some analysis of how workers are using the Microsoft 365 suite of applications. It shows, on average, workers spend most of their time (57%) communicating and only 43% creating things.
There’s a lot to unpack from that finding.
Communicating covers meetings, email and online chat. Perhaps you could get more creative work done if you had fewer meetings to attend.
However, only those in a position of relative power/seniority have a lot of control over which meetings they attend and for how long.
For the rest of us, my advice is: get better at communicating. If you’re going to be spending more than a day of each week in meetings, make sure you get the most out of them.
And for emails and online chat, find ways to be more productive.
- Write shorter, clearer messages.
- Write effective subject lines
- Use a text expansion app that will save you lots of time writing standard messages.
- Learn to use the voice transcription service that is built into your device because you can speak faster than you can type.
- Set up inbox filters/rules that process some of the incoming email before you even see them.