OK, you’re almost there! Many of you will fly out the door tomorrow and not be seen again until 2015. Hopefully your year-end money will keep streaming in, in your absence, as though on auto-pilot. Happy landings!

But if you’re planning even a few moments for reflection of what went wrong in 2014 — and how you might fix it in 2015 — as you otherwise celebrate the holidays, I urge you to look through this review of the possibilities from AtTask.

Now these folks have project management ‘enterprise solutions’ to sell, and that’s probably not on your Christmas shopping list. But set that aside, I think you’ll be able to identify with most of the productivity sinkholes they describe in 9 Levels of Work Hell.

Partly cheeky, but grounded in reality, 9 Levels describes a series of workplace conundrums, gives some fascinating statistical nuggets on the amount of time wasted and productivity lost, and offers some sound advice on steps (called ‘Escape Tactics’) you can take to improve the situation going forward … even if you don’t buy their product!

The 9 Levels …

1. Tool hell — the average executive loses six weeks a year looking for missing information.
2. Rework hell — 25-40% of all spending on projects is wasted as a result of re-work (e.g., starting from scratch every time).
3. Fire Drill hell — the average organization spends 45-50% of its time on unplanned activities.
4. Silo hell — siloed information is a ubiquitous issue throughout the business (i.e., bureaucratic) world.
5. Reporting hell — managers try desperately to put together reports they need for meetings and to justify their jobs … “scrambling to compile information that may or may not exist”).
6. Meeting hell (don’t get Roger started on this one!) — on average, 31 hours per month are spent in unproductive meetings … 73% of workers do other work while in meetings!
7. Interruption hell — the average employee endures 56 interruptions a day, and spends two hours a day recovering from them!
8. Email Hell — the average employee checks their email 36 time per hour.
9. Collaboration hell — tough one, since there’s both over- and under-collaboration.

So, how many of these 9 Levels of Work Hell have you visited in the past year? How many are you determined to escape in 2015?

Tom

P.S. Jeff Brooks at Future Fundraising Now has written his own 9-part series on ‘Fundraising Hell’, called JEFF’S INFERNO. It’s a ‘must read’.