The Societal Impacts of my Coffee Consumption

I love coffee. I love the smell, the taste, the feeling after the first sip. Rarely a day goes by that I don't have coffee and never a day goes by when I don't have coffee at work. I also have an interest in Public Administration. That interest stemmed from a PA class I took in college that I hated until I was able to apply it to real life and my job. The most important thing I learned in that class from Dave Ivers was that if as an employer your workers are producing at 50% of their capacity, you as an employer are playing about par for the course. With that thought in mind its comical to think about the 40 hour work week. I'm convinced though that there are a ton of public administrators out there that assume their employees work at 100% capacity for exactly 40 hours per week. I find it even more ridiculous that the impression is that the amount of work someone is assigned should take exactly the amount of time that employee works - miraculous. People are literally tied to a 40 hour a week job that could be done in 15 hours a week. Sure there are exceptions but that is largely the case. People always claim to be "busy", busy googling your own name does not constitute 100% of a workers capacity.

Since its the day before vacation I started thinking about how unproductive I was being and noticed that it killed time to refill my coffee. I thought it would be interesting to see how much productivity is lost in a given year because of my drinking coffee.

During the average work day I fill my coffee cup between four and five times. Each trip takes about 45 seconds and I actually make the coffee about two times per week, which takes about 4 minutes.

So 4 times per day x 45 seconds x 5 days a week = 15 minutes per week to pour coffee
Two times per week brewing coffee x 4 minutes = 8 Minutes per week to make coffee

So far 23 minutes per week.

What happens when you drink a pot of coffee in the morning? Bathroom break! I'd say in a given day I got to the bathroom 3 times per day because of all the coffee. At 2.5 minutes per trip (its down the hall) that is conservatively 7.5 minutes per day.

7.5 minutes per day times five days a week 37.5 minutes per week of secondary affects of the coffee.

So 23 minutes for coffee making and pouring and 37 minutes for those secondary affects we have 60 minutes per week.

We'll remove vacation time and say 60 minutes times 50 weeks per year for the annual total of 3,000 minutes or 50 hours. My work week is 37.5 hours which means 1.33 work weeks (conservatively) are used up directly because of my coffee consumption. In our "budget" the average cost for a staff hour is 40 dollars (we're frugal) that is just personal costs not indirect or other.

So 40 dollars times 50 hours is $2,000 per year in lost productivity. I'm not the only one who drinks coffee either.

I'm an administrative nightmare!

My cup is empty, time to refill.