From a UK Bureau of Labor and Stats study, the average office worker is only productive for ~3 hours/day. People spend the majority of their time surfing the internet, socializing, eating/drinking, and looking for a new job. I wonder if it's worse in east asian countries where no one leaves before the boss.
I can vouch for that statement. A daily standup that exceeds 30 mins, a grooming and planning meeting that extends all 8 hours of a day in a sprint with unclear stories, surprise bug triage meetings ranging between 30 mins to 2 hrs, meetings where I cant possibly contribute, updating user stories with questions about the story, convincing people on why we shouldn’t be working on backend and ui without well defined contracts all account for over 30% to 60% of my time on a team with over 4 members.
It seems like you are highlighting business process / management problems rather than workspace problem. In my experience web conferences / hangouts overrun just as often as physical meetings. Are you suggesting that these meetings just wouldn't happen if people were not in the office, or that they would somehow be more efficient? If the latter, how might this be the case?
I am presenting instances of non productive rituals/tasks that constantly eat up my working hours. Working remotely allows me to mentally disconnect from such meetings and partially get mundane work tasks done e.g. reports, running testcases, emails to other teams, fix minor bugs, etc. which i constantly fail at when in a room with other physical people. Kinda sucks when i describe it that way but true.
