Is 540 million minutes per day a large number or a small number?

Every day Americans reportedly waste 540 million minutes looking for lost or misplaced items. That sounds like it’s a large number, but what’s in it for me? What is my share of it?

According to the 2010 Census the U.S. population was 308,745,538 people. When we divide 540 million by that, the result is just 1.75 minutes per day per person. I probably spend more than two minutes a day washing my hands, or waiting at traffic lights, so it’s really a relatively small number. (Last August I blogged on How to make a large number incomprehensible - or comprehensible).

That apparently large number turned up on September 3rd in a post by Jeff Davidson in his Interruption Management blog titled Taking on Too Much Leads to Waste. (He stated it as nine million hours per day). It’s a silly factoid that goes back at least to 2000, where it was stated beginning with another alleged detail as:

“According to the American Demographic Society, Americans waste more than nine million hours each day looking for lost and misplaced articles.”

I checked the current Encyclopedia of Associations in the database collection at the Boise Public Library, and couldn’t find that organization. Also, I couldn’t find them in magazine or newspaper databases, or online on Google.

Following that factoid Jeff cited another claiming:

“The average adult spends 16 hours a year searching for lost keys.”

That’s 960 minutes per year, or just 2.63 minutes per day. Again, its not really a huge fraction of the day. But keys are one type of lost or misplaced item. So, why would I be spending more time looking just for them than for everything I’ve lost or misplaced? Those two factoids contradict each other.

There’s another factoid from an August 4, 1992 Wall Street Journal article  that originally said:

“Executives waste nearly six weeks a year looking for misplaced items, according to a poll of 200 large-company execs for Accountemps, a temporary-help firm.”

On page 67 in the second edition (2004) of her book Organizing from the Inside Out, Julie Morgenstern reworded it as:

“The Wall Street Journal reported that the average U.S. executive wastes six weeks per year searching for missing information in messy desks. (That translates to just one hour per day!)”

Similar claims continue to appear on web pages about organizing like this one and this one.

How many minutes per year is that? 6 times 7 times 24 times 60, or 60,480 minutes. When we divide that by 365.25, we get 165 minutes per day, or 2-/3/4 hours (and not just one hour like Julie had claimed). Or, if we assume 250 business days per year, it would be 242 minutes per business day, or just over four hours.

It sure is a lot bigger than the 1.75 or 2.63 minutes I previously discussed. I don’t believe for a minute that any organization really would keep an executive that wasted that much time though.

If you want your audience to understand statistics, then please use consistent units they can understand - such as minutes per day (per person). Check to see if those numbers make good sense.

Some unhelpful cartoon advice if you are scared of public speaking

Yesterday, September 20, 2012, Michael Kupperman posted a lurid (but hilarious) four-panel Helpful Advice cartoon at Huffington Post. It contains three very dubious suggestions, including the Nicholas Cage method, which is to:

“Contort your brow until your eyes lose focus! You can’t be scared of an audience you can’t see!” 

The Speak-No-Evil monkey image was extracted from the Three Wise Monkeys.

Poverty was the greatest fear in Glamour magazine’s 2012 Guy Survey

In January 2012 Glamour magazine surveyed 1000 men. One of the many questions they asked was:

“What would you say was your greatest fear?”

Answers are shown above in a bar chart. (Click for a larger clearer version). Poverty (36%) came first, followed by death (23%), a tie between failing at work and never finding love (13%), speaking in public (10%), and commitment (5%). Public speaking came fifth. Over twice as many guys feared death as feared public speaking, which contradicts the constantly repeated cliche derived from the 1977 Book of Lists.

Another question they asked was:

“What do you think about most in a single day?”

Answers are shown above in another bar chart. Sex (38%) came first, followed by money (31%), work (14%), my appearance (8%), food (5%) and my sports team (4%). Most of their other survey questions were about sex & love (which are the subtitle for that magazine).

Their 2011 Guy Survey only had one fears question about Which scares you more? Two choices were the threat of tsunamis, tornadoes, or terrorism (61%) or the threat of going bald (39%).

Public speaking came first in a 1987 fear survey by Dental Health Advisor magazine

In the past month or so I have been digging up some more obscure surveys on what people fear. One came from the Spring 1987 issue of a magazine called Dental Health Advisor. I couldn’t get back to the original article, but on a newspaper database I found the data reported in an article titled Opinion Digest that had appeared on page 2 in the April 3, 1987 issue of the Miami Herald. On Google Books I found the same data reported on page 24 of the April 27, 1987 issue of Jet magazine. Finally, I found a table and a bar chart of that data on pages xi and 3 of a book by Stanley F. Malamed, titled Sedation: A Clinical Guide to Patient Management, 5th edition, 2010 over at Scribd.com.

The bar chart shown above presents all the data (Click on it to see a larger, clearer version). 27% feared public speaking, 21% feared going to the dentist, 20% feared heights, 12% feared mice, 9% feared flying, and the remaining 11% had other or no fears. 

Snakes came first in a 1988 Roper survey of what American adults were afraid of or bothered by

In the past month I’ve been looking around for more surveys about what people fear. In a May 29, 1989 New York Times article about how Meek and Mumblers Learn Ways of Getting a Word In Alison Leigh Cowan mentioned that:

“A national survey by The Roper Organization in 1988 showed 26 percent of adult Americans said they feared public speaking, second on the list of fears presented only to the 41 percent who admitted a fear of snakes. Add the 35 percent who said they were slightly bothered by public speaking and well over half the population would probably need encouragement to take the podium. The poll, which included 1,982 interviews, had a margin of sampling error of plus or minus three percentage points.”

Further Google search led me to an Acrobat .pdf file of a long paper by R. A. Mittermeier, J. L. Carr, I. R. Swingland, T. B. Werner, and R. B. Mast, titled Conservation of amphibians and Reptiles, in K. Adler (ed.) Herpetology - Current Research on the Biology of Amphibians and Reptiles (Proceedings of the First World Congress of Herpetology), Society for the Study of Amphibians and Reptiles, Oxford Ohio, 1992, pages 59 to 80. Table 3 lists results from Roper Reports 88-3, which was titled Phobias: snakes mice, spiders - and public speaking.

A bar chart shows the rankings for what people were afraid of or bothered by. (Click on it to see a larger, clearer version). Snakes were first at 65%, followed by public speaking at 61%, heights at 45%, mice at 37%, and spiders and insects at 36%. There also had been a 1977 survey that didn’t ask about public speaking with snakes at 69%, heights at 45%, mice at 36%, and spiders and insects at 37%. This  1988 survey had different rankings than a 1996 Roper survey, in which fear of public speaking came first.

I’ve seen caution or warning signs about snakes being present in an area. But, I’d never seen one like the public speaking sign shown above - which I made up starting from a blank Danger Sign.

Luposlipaphobia is as useful a word as glossophobia

What is it? Luposlipaphobia was defined by Gary Larson as:

“The fear of being pursued by timber wolves around a kitchen table while wearing socks on a newly waxed floor.”

That definition was the caption for one of his The Far Side cartoons. You can find it here or here. In Wikipedia luposlipaphobia shows up on their List of Phobias under the heading of jocular and fictional phobias.  

Glossophobia is a pseudo-technical term for public speaking anxiety. It might as well refer to the fear of lip gloss or waxing your car. Nevertheless it keeps showing up in the titles of blog posts like this one. Sometimes it’s even misspelled as glossaphobia. Just like the word atelophobia, using it as a search term will send you down blind alleys. 

Review of The Art of Public Speaking: Lessons from the Greatest Speeches in History

The Art of Public Speaking: Lessons from the Greatest Speeches in History is a series of twelve half-hour lectures by Professor John R. Hale (Director of Liberal Studies at the University of Louisville) It is packaged as a set of two DVDs with a 45 page booklet.

Dr. Hale is an archaeologist, not a communications professor. Among other things he’s written a Scientific American magazine article on viking longships, and a book, Lords of the Sea: The Epic Story of the Athenian Navy and the Birth of Democracy.

Titles for those dozen lectures are:

1. Overcome Obstacles - Demosthenes of Athens
2. Practice Your Delivery - Patrick Henry
3. Be Yourself - Elizabeth I to Her Army
4. Find Your Humorous Voice - Will Rogers
5. Make It a Story - Marie Curie on Radium
6. Use the Power of Threes - Paul to His People
7. Build a Logical Case - Susan B. Anthony
8. Paint Pictures in Words - Tecumseh on Unity
9. Focus on Your Audience - Gandhi on Trial
10. Share a Vision - Martin Luther King’s Dream
11. Change Minds and Hearts - Mark Antony
12. Call for Positive Action - Lincoln at Gettysburg

In Lecture 5, Make It a Story, Dr. Hale wisely comments:

“Now, I’ve always felt that something that is relegated to a minor part of most textbooks on public speaking and rhetoric is the most important thing: storytelling.”

His main subject is Marie Curie’s 1921 speech at the Vassar College graduation. (Marie shared the 1903 Nobel Prize in Physics with her husband Pierre and Henri Becquerel, and then also won the 1911 Nobel Prize in Chemistry). Dr. Hale includes her statement that:

“When radium was discovered, no one knew that it would prove useful in hospitals. The work was one of pure science, which must be done for itself, for the beauty of science.”

In Lecture 5 he also discusses two other stories in some detail. One is the story of how Odysseus returned to Ithaca disguised as a beggar (from Homer’s Odyssey). The other is the Parable of the Good Samaritan (from the Book of Luke in the New Testament).  

The set is sold as item #2031 from The Great Courses series. It has a list price of $199.95, but currently it is being sold at Amazon for $40 to $100. I enjoyed watching these lectures. I borrowed them for free from the Boise Public Library. If I’d have paid $50 instead, I would not have been disappointed.

The painting of Demosthenes of Athens practicing his oratory is from Wikimedia Commons.