Have you had to deal with unproductive people at work or in your personal life? I mean people that seem to be working hard but get relatively little done. Seems they get frustrated with others around them because they feel they are pulling more of the load but in reality they really are not.
Oh, yes! Often they seemed the busiest in the organization, but at the end of the day you couldn’t figure out what had been accomplished.
Not only these people accomplish little, they also distract others from doing what needs to be done by calling endless meetings, sending flurries of emails, etc.
Yes- strangely everyone around me keeps telling me how busy and over worked that person is. has them all fooled for many years.
Yes, I had one coworker who put a lot of effort in getting out of work.
I label them as inefficient. They take a great deal of pride in doing things the hard way, wasting time and energy to accomplish the same other workers could in half the time. Then they spend a lot of time telling others how much time they put in. The thinly veiled message is that if others do not put in the same amount of time, they are not hard workers.
On the contrary, I think the workers who are efficient are the hard workers.
The worst is when the boss buys into it, often because the person expends more energy managing up than doing their job.
What Bunsen said - YES!
At work there are people who start and end each day chatting for a good 45 minutes - with lots of dilly dallying inbetween!
At home, my husband falls into this pit. Starts if not one thing, but five - and gets none of them finished! Drives me NUTS!
There are a lot of people like that, that make it seem like they are both working hard and are efficient, when they aren’t, they just make a big noise about it. What is worse is that managers who don’t know any better often think that this type of person are the most valuable, in part because they have been told by those people how hard they work, how much they do. Unfortunately, what often happens is other people end up doing twice the work to cover for this person, because otherwise things would not get done and the entire group would suffer.
I actually had something like this happen on a performance review, the person heading my department told me I wasn’t putting in weekends and late nights, even though I was more than getting done what needed to get done, and pointed out someone else in the department who made work for everyone else, didn’t get stuff finished because they were very slow, and otherwise wasn’t very efficient, as an ‘example of someone I should emulate’ (for the record, when push comes to shove, I have been notorious for the hours I’ll put in to get things done, the prior year I had an entire summer where i was working 6, 7 day weeks, 80, 90 hours, to get a crucial project out). That was the beginning of the end for me there, it taught me that if you have management like that, either you play the game or get out, also taught me that image sadly often trumps real performance, companies for example where they think it is better to put in a 12 hour day even though people spend many hours doing nothing, rather than getting a lot done in an 8 or 9 hour day,not looking at the results.
Well if you think about it, aren’t half of people “relatively” more productive than the other half?
my dad has always told me in a job setting the person who complains about how hard they work and how little every one else does is almost always the person doing the least and causing the most trouble. as I work more I find that statement to be 100% accurate!
Fortunately for someone I know their work was easily quantifiable (which doesn’t always happen).
So when a couple co-workers complained that they weren’t staying late/doing overtime/working hard enough etc and making life pretty miserable all around with gossip and innuendo to the point of the employee wanting to quit, the boss was able to tell the department in a meeting that the employee accomplished MORE than ANY of them on a daily basis and was the best worker in the department. So shut up and step up. Let’s just say that the worker employee is still there and the complainers are gone. And kudos to the boss who took care of the situation.
gouf78 cleaning house is sometimes needed for what is best for the company and other employees (even ones you think are not in the circle you are dealing with) are much happier and more productive when the negativity is removed.
we had one person where I worked, who always worked late. The bosses all thought he was a hard worker. We, his peers, always said a task that would take us 10-15 minutes, would take him hours to complete.
I have a coworker who fascinates me because he expends an insane amount of energy coming up with ways to farm out his work. At first I thought he was lazy, but that doesn’t make sense since he puts so much effort into coming up with schemes, then I thought he was too arrogant to actually work, but another coworker whom I respect very much gently explained that the inefficient coworker has been so left behind by technology that he can’t do the work anymore.
Oh no…I think I am one of the unproductive people:(
I work in a research lab, and it seems (lately) no matter what I do, I end up spinning my wheels and accomplishing NOTHING. I try (I really do!) But nothing ends up suiting my criteria for believable and quantifiable data. I happily will work weekends and 10 hour days if I think the experiment is working, but it is discouraging when you do that a few weeks in a row, and the statistics don’t support the hypothesis:/
BalletMom, plant a tree, paint a piece of pottery, or sew a garment. That takes care of “experiments are going nowhere” blues. 
In the end, while your negative result does not look tangible, it really is tangible, because of its value to others: it closes the dead end road for other researchers in your lab who might later come up with the same idea. Knowing about this work, they will be better armed. It is not like you are twiddling your thumbs all day long pretending that you are so busy you can’t answer a simple email!
In academia there is a kind of person who dislikes teaching and research but likes going to meetings and chairing committees. We’ll call the person Bob. Bob can often convince administrators that he should be given some small quasi-administrative assignment in exchange for a few classroom hours. In a few years, that role will grow, at the expense of more classroom hours. Admins like Bob because Bob kisses butt. As a reward, Bob may be transferred to a larger role in an equally meaningless task. Bob gets an office in the admin building. He sends out a lot of email to prove his value. Eventually, Bob becomes a full-time admin doing absolutely nothing that matters … at twice my salary. We real faculty just shake our heads.
I suspect Bob’s are not unique to academe.
I have a friend who works rather high up at our local VA hospital. She has a new boss who drives her crazy. She can’t possibly ever finish her work because he is always calling people in to meetings. He’ll keep her in different meetings for 4 - 6 hours a day! When can she actually DO anything?
There seems to be a lot of running around in circles out there and bigger institutions are particularly prone to that.
balletmom research is not the same! when you are researching something you can not put a timeline on the end result. it applies to say a pizza restaurant. I make 25 pizzas an hour and you work side by side with me and you average 3. and you complain how hard you work to everyone around you and how the pizza restaurant would not stay open with out you! rearsch is going into uncharted territory and maybe a regrouping or different angle is needed but you can not judge productivity the same way in that setting.