Brits waste 2.1 billion hours a year on slow and unreliable technology

We’ve all had to sit around waiting for our gadgets to work properly, whether that means waiting for a crashed computer to reboot, waiting for webpages to load, or waiting for your router to actually work the way it should. It might just be a couple of minutes here and there, but all that waiting does add up.

As it turns out, research from Crucial.com has found that the average person wastes 39 hours on slow and unreliable technology each year, and with some people even wasting as much as 121 hours. Add that up and it means 2.1 billion hours are wasted across the UK. Imagine how you could’ve spent that time?

It turns out people have put some thought into that, with the research finding that 42% of people would have preferred to use the wasted time watching TV or a movie, 24% saying they’d rather spend more time with their kids, 13% would have preferred to go on a date with their partner, and 33% said they wish they’d been able to take a nap instead. All excellent reasons, and definitely more worthy of a person’s time than sitting around waiting for the computer to do as its told.

Technolgy has been slowly pushing its way into our everyday lives for some time now, and in some cases it has problems that wouldn’t have occurred on the thing it originally replaced. E-readers for instance could well crash or slow down, whereas a book has no such issue. Is it something we should just have to live with, though?

Image: Jason Scott via Wikimedia Commons