In daily life, minutes slip through our hands like sand slipping through our fingers. Few things deter a person more than wasting time. Because time is not just money, timing is everything. And at the end of the day, we all, or almost all of us, wish it had lasted 30 or 35 hours. Or more. 24 was never enough, especially when we had to dedicate eight to sleep and eight to work.

Even more frustrating, the average person in the world wastes an astonishing 26 days a year doing nothing, almost two hours a day. A study pointed out that the place where we waste the most time while talking on the phone is waiting. 45% of the respondents stated that they were waiting in store queues, while 44% stated that they were in a traffic jam. 15% of adults said they didn’t realize how time passed while waiting for the coffee or teapot to be ready.

Like knowing this, there are few things more depressing than calculating how much time we waste each day. You will spend a third of your life sleepingDeciding what to watch on Netflix or HBO for almost a decade or four months by looking at a cell phone. This study by the Maryland and Delaware Enterprise University Partnership (MADEUP) has transferred this dynamic to working life, to time lost doing banal tasks at work.

To do this, they surveyed the time use of 5,000 office workers in the United States and the United Kingdom, and then the researchers estimated these numbers to derive an estimate of the lifetime “weighted total worthlessness” (WTF) they might have. better spent.

It will surprise many that as workers, the most time we spend is correcting typos. an average of 20 minutes a dayThe equivalent of 180 days or half a year over a 45-year career. According to The Economist, among the most common examples of misspellings are the “arm” to go “out” or “hug” when saying “greet”. The most common in English are “thnaks” followed by “teh”, “yuo” and “remeber”.

Another of the great black holes of the time is found in computer security. In addition to losing up to 145 days, the average employee who enters during his working life many more months trying to remember passwords, incorrect entry or update. Not only that, refusing repeated requests to schedule computer updates is another part of our existence that will never come back. How about turning off the popup ads or pausing the autoplay video?

Then there is the organizational space. It takes more than four months of a worker’s life to complete tasks that focus on ordering our workspace. The most general: delete emails (six weeks of your life)Clicking on Slack channels to read messages that aren’t for you or clearing mobile notifications – more.

The list goes on and on. Coordination of meeting agendas to be canceled later: one more month. Waiting for people to repeat things because you accidentally muted your Zoom or Google Meets app: two weeks. Spending hours composing an email and then leaving it in the drafts folder: two days. Everything counts.

And studies like this one show that technology is at the center of this wasted time. But the truth is that what it saves us so much more. What would our lives be like without the technology we have now? It’s even slower and much more boring. Or were all the days lost for the letter to reach its addressee? With WhatsApp, this takes less than a second.