Since we’re a gang of egotistical guys hanging around all day, we’ve always assumed we’re the crème de la crème here at RescueTime. Turns out, we were right. Our team is regularly in the 90th percentile or higher for weekly productivity. We figure it’s because we’re productivity guys, it’s what we do. To get some answers with a little more data, and little less ego, I’ve started digging through the hundreds of millions of man hours in our database. From what I can tell, the 23rd chromosome has a pretty amazing impact on the way people use computers. Full disclosure: I happen to be a man.
1) Women spend more time socializing and shopping
The 4,000 women sampled managed to rack up an astounding 87,585 hours on social networking sites, which accounts for about 6.4% of their time. Their male counterparts, on the other hand, spend 39% less time drinking from the fire hydrant of virtual friendship. It’s not that men are less interested in being social either. In fact, in our population, more men use social networks than women (72% of men vs 69% of women). When it comes to shopping online, women spend 63% more of their time picking out their goodies than men do. Men have their distractions, too. They spend about 15% more of their time reading the news than women.
2) Men multi task more than women
I was surprised to find that men switch their active focus about 18% more often than women. On average men switch windows 53 times per hour, compared to women who clocked in at 45 per hour.
These switches can be anything from one email to the next, or to something completely… OMG, hold on a sec, Tony just posted new pics of his recent getaway… Oh, sorry, back to work.
3) Men work more diligently than women
The average guy spends pretty close to 50% of his computer time doing things he considers distracting. No wonder our information economy is being eaten piecemeal by developing countries where people still have a work ethic. Wait, what? You thought I said men work harder, but they spend half their time distracted? That’s right, women only manage to be productive with about 43% of their time.
4) Women spend fewer hours on their computers
Evidently, there’s a reason they are called “man” hours. On average, male information workers spend 14% more time per day working on their computers than women do.
5) Do men simply care more about productivity?
RescueTime only has data from people who’ve decided they’d like to use our tools to get more out of life. Everyone who uses our software has at least made it to step #1: “Admit you have a problem”. If this is any indication, nearly 5 times more men than women install our tools to get more productive.
All this adds up to huge differences in the amount of knowledge work men get done compared to women. Our data shows women only work 76% of the time that men do. Interestingly, the National Committee on Pay Equity found that women earn 77% of what their male counter parts do.
About the data:
RescueTime provides a tool to allow individuals and businesses to track their time and attention to see where their days go (and to help them get more productive!). We have hundreds of millions of man hours of second-by-second attention data from hundreds of thousands of users around the world, tracking both inside and outside the browser. The data for this report was compiled from 8,000 randomly selected men and women.
About our software:
If you want to see how productive you are vs the rest of our users, you should check out our tools. Better yet, get your entire team signed up and put the rest of those slackers to shame. It’s not really that hard. Our data shows that your coworkers are probably taking it even easier than you are, since you at least made it over here to our blog.
Subscribe to the Feed