We are wasting up to 20% of our time on computer problems, says study

Developers: Those are rookie numbers

Do they include "fighting with anti patterns and dark patterns" as broken? It's pretty insane how much misalignment there is between what most people want their computers to do and what the companies want people to do, which seems to largely be "look at ads literally everywhere".

How much time do we waste on car problems? Neighbor problems? Political problems? Grocery problems?

My job is to fix computers so I waste 100% of my time with computer problems.

Linux users brings the numbers up

It's not a waste if I'm getting paid to do it full time

This is 100% due to Microsoft, google and Apple. If you dont understand, I'm not defending my position, or explaining further.

Whatever. I waste probably 20 hours a week on “work”.

Jokes on you! My whole life is a waste of time

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"Up to 20%" is meaningless for a headline and is pure click bait. It could be any number between 0% and 20%. Or put another way, any number from no time at all to a horrifying more than an entire day per week.

Why not just state the average from what is probably a statistically irrelevant study and move on?

We are wasting up to 20% of our time with bronze problems.
-- Some grumpy dude circa 3300 BC

Using the word "we" loosely.

I certainly don't. If I can't fix it in 5 minutes, I just ignore the problem. And I wish everyone else would too and stop complaining about the smoke coming out of the machine. It's fine.

Sounds more like a lot of people could do with some basic computer skills training.

How about everyone who has zero skills with these problems, do they count is 0% spent on them as they outsource it or do they count as 100% since the smallest problem incapacitates their computer usage?

At least 10 percent of my time sitting in a classroom in college was waiting for the prof to get the projector to work with their laptop.

That number was more like 30% with a windows laptop and all the security crap Microsoft convinced my company to install. It was so painfully slow and glitchy. So I went rogue and put Linux on my company laptop 8 months ago and I'm not looking back.

53% of my time is spent looking for CASE statements without an END. This is 99% human error - does that count?

With focused R&D, we can make it 70%!

Yeah, I know. What of it?

Those are rookie numbers. Install Linux and pump those numbers up.

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Computers would be far less interesting if there weren‘t any problems to solve. Fiddling around really is half the fun for me, even when it can get frustrating.

I thought the title said “We are wasting up to 20% of our time on computers.”

My immediate thought was “That seems way too low…”

Just stop having computer problems

That's why I only use mentats.

I think we're all just chasing our tails sometimes

Most of my time is lost on cloud services that got shittier over time.

My personal computer just works on Linux.

Doesn't surprise me at all lol, technology is always broken

I recognise the waste in waiting time, but I also think we are still increasing productivity more than enough to make up for it.

Personally I solve it by multitasking harder. Whenever there is a waiting time for a download or other stuff I simply start doing something else. I'm not going to waste my life watching loading bars for a living.

I don't think increasing user-friendlyness is a good solution. It's pretty much what caused the issues to begin with. Every time Windows or the apps make something more user-friendly it always results in more buttons to click and more updates to keep up.

I also spend an unreasonable amount of time just rearranging the windows in comparison to back when apps had keyboard-only GUIs with functions layered in different pages or tabs. I obviously don't think that is a good solution today either, but it goes to show that the bloated operating system has a lot of the blame.

Say you want to do something simple like renaming a file, you'll need to open an app to show the folders and files and also 100 different functions that are of no use for the specific task, position and scroll it where it's visible, navigate by mouse or keyboard and then do whatever you wanted. My point is that just operating the operation system is something that requires 10s of seconds over and over again every day. There's a long way from thought to execution for the simplest task.

The good thing is that it enables a lot of people to do so without any training at all, so maybe that makes up for it in total.