7 Ways Technology Could Actually Be Limiting Productivity

By Tiffany Harper
on 23 September 2019

We’re living in the age of technology and progress, where new solutions arrive daily to help us achieve better results in almost every aspect of our lives. We get our mail faster because of the internet, we can purchase products from all over the world and manage to save money, and our workplace is full of tech solutions that make our jobs much easier.

However, it’s not all rainbows and butterflies when it comes to the impact that automated solutions make on our personal or professional engagement. There are plenty of ways in which technology could limit our productivity and make us less efficient, our current article is going to let you in on the seven most common ones. Are you ready? Let’s hit it!

Social Media Usage

social media, apps, productivity

How often do you check your social media accounts? Would it interest you to know how much time people usually spend on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and other forms of digital social interaction? According to recent studies, on an average level, a person spends at least three hours a day on social networks. Furthermore, the most active period of social media use is during work hours, which means we spend our work hours socialising instead of focusing on our work. 

It doesn’t matter if we’re chatting with our friends, browsing through our last week’s night out photos or taking part in an online discussion, our boss sure wouldn’t be happy seeing us like that. Often, we go online just for a moment and the next thing we know it’s time for lunch. Social media is highly distractive, thus a huge negative impact on our overall productivity.

Dependence On Outside Factors

Internet outage or loss of electric power could destroy hours of work in some cases and get you back on the start no matter how close you were to finishing your work. This is one of the greatest downsides of the technology, the dependence on resources that we often can’t control. Imagine uploading a substantially large file when suddenly the internet connection breaks and you have to start all over again. It’s as daunting as an unproductive endeavor to do the same task all over again just because the internet was down for a few minutes.

The Fear Of Downsizing

robot, redundancy, productivity

It’s almost a rule that with every investment in some latest technology means losing a few of our colleagues to staff downsizing. We don’t need curriers if we can send documents and files via email, right? Imagine working in an agency that’s providing dissertation writing help and the boss decides to introduce AI-driven writing software. Would you be worried about your position and wonder “Will this software grab my essay writer’s bread and eat it in front of me?” You probably would, and that’s where productivity issues start, even though the software won’t gloat about taking over your job, the stress caused by the fear of being replaced simply kills our ability to perform and our productivity goes down.

Security Issues

The ability to connect with other computers over the internet is both a blessing and a curse. We’re able to send and receive any file we need in just a few seconds, but we can also provide access to some uninvited guests which would harm our workplace network security. As a lot of workplaces incorporate “bring your own device” policy, it’s easy to get into a situation where a private device endangers the integrity of the business network. Furthermore, DDOS or some other kind of attack on your business server could prevent you from doing your work.

Training Reduces Productive Work Time

Every time we get a new piece of software or hardware we need to spend some time adapting to it and learning the ropes. Some of us enjoy learning about this kind of stuff, while others require more time to get the hang of how things work and how we can implement a certain feature or functionality most efficiently. 

Now imagine being the one that learns fast and your closest colleague is not the brightest bulb in the room so you have to take your time helping them out to figure out how the update works. Not only is the person you’re helping reducing their overall productivity, but your work efforts are being diminished as you leave your tasks waiting while you’re trying to be a good peer. I’ve had a similar situation where I had to leave my work waiting to help a colleague with new software solution while I was a writer at Bestessaytips.com, and consequences showed their face on a dissertation writing services review page. It wasn’t the most pleasant learning experience, still, the lesson was learned.

Obsolete Tech

Even worse than dealing with a tech update, is having to work on an obsolete machine as productivity demands rise. In time every piece of tech loses some of its performance features, while at the same time, your skills improve and your boss gives you even more work as your progress is showing. At some point, your computer or any other kind of tech tool will start misbehaving, making it difficult to finish your work in time. 

As time goes by, a computer will stop working on its own, it will freeze or start restarting on its own, become incompatible with some software solutions you should use, the list of potential challenges is endless and none of them have a positive effect on your productivity at work.

Alerts Causing Distraction

smartwatch, tech, productivity

Scientific research indicates that it takes somewhere around 23 minutes to get our focus back once we’ve been distracted by an alert or notification. When we’re in our office we often don’t pay attention to the number of notifications we get during the day. Incoming calls, emails, all sorts of reminders, private messages; all these occurrences take away a portion of our time to read and answer if needed. If we take into consideration the above mentioned 23-minute span we need to get back into the game, one would think it’s best if we never check our notification unless we want to spend the entire day at our office.

Conclusion

Technology helps us do our jobs better, faster, and more accurately. However, the tech is not able to do our job for us, which is why we need to pay attention to our approach to software and hardware innovations in the workplace. As we can see from these few examples, there is a thin line that separates when a certain tech is helpful and when it can utterly destroy all our professional efforts. Let us know in the comments if you had a situation where technology harmed your productivity.

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