The Mental Cost of Slow Computers

Have you ever been working on a big project and felt as if you’re “in the zone”? Your full attention is on what you’re doing, you lose track of time, and don’t even notice what’s going on around you. It’s a great feeling, isn’t it?

Now, think about what happens when you’re “in the zone,” and you’re calculating data, or writing a summary, or searching for an answer online, and suddenly the program you’re working on stops responding or your computer suddenly slows to a crawl. You lose your momentum and immediately fall out of “the zone.”

We’ve all been there.

Many people don’t realize how insidious and how costly computer interruptions are. A studyconducted by Information Week and CA Technologies in 2011 estimated the cost of computer downtime at $26.5 billion – not million, but billion – in lost revenue.

Research by IT provider Managed 24/7 and YouGov found that approximately 5.59% of private-sector employees in the United Kingdom (UK) are wasting an entire day every month due to IT issues at an annual cost of $44.9 billion to the UK economy. The research also found that less than 15% of employees reported NO IT problems in the past year and many said they thought their workplace IT systems were damaging their ability to do good work.

The numbers may vary, but the fact is that slow computers and computer downtime waste both time and money. There is the obvious cost of paying an employee to stare at a computer screen waiting for something to happen, but there are many indirect costs that you may not think about.

Here are just three.

When an employee is working on a task, and they’re “interrupted” by a slow computer, their train of thought is interrupted, and it can take a while to regather their thoughts and get back on task. They’ve lost their momentum

Fast Companyreported that it takes an average of 23 minutes and 15 seconds to get back to a task after an interruption.

An experiment conducted by Fast Company found that people who were interrupted while performing a task “had higher levels of stress, frustration, mental effort, feeling of time pressure and mental workload.”

This stress may be caused by the added pressure of having less time to do what needs to be done. If an employee is required to repeatedly work longer hours to get their work done, it may cost the company more money in wages, but more importantly, it may cause burnout in the employee causing them to leave. You can lose good employees. Plus, you incur all the costs of replacing that employee.

A surveyof 6,000 European employees found that slow, outdated computers and intermittent internet connections demoralize workers, and 38% of those employees said that modern technology would make them more motivated.

The CA Technologies survey found the average business experiences approximately 14 hours of downtime per year, and after each downtime incident, an employee’s performance returns to roughly 70 percent of what it was before the downtime. Plus, slow computers can cause employees to miss project or delivery deadlines, which often results in dissatisfied customers and colleagues.

Are slow computers keeping your employees from performing their best and affecting your bottom line? With today’s technology, there really is no excuse for slow computers. Rather than viewing the cost of keeping your computers up-to-date and running at peak performance as an expense, perhaps you should consider it as one of the best investments you can make to improve productivity and your bottom line.

Don’t suffer from slow computers any longer. Give Eberly Systems a call at (610) 374-4049 or find us online . Our reliable and scalable managed IT Services can help ensure that your computers are maintained at their peak performance without the expense of a full-time IT department.