Pings have to change

Trump-like cyberslacking blamed for Brits’ pitiful productivity level

YOU can read this column on your smartphone by clicking on to Twitter or Facebook. But the Government would prefer it if you didn’t.

This has nothing to do with censorship and everything to do with keeping your nose to t he grindstone.

Analysis by Bank of England staffers shows a link between t he t enfold increase in smartphones over the last decade and weak productivity since 2008.

They blame this on “cyberslacking” – workers checking their phones up to 150 times a day when social media pings.

It then takes another 25 minutes to refocus on work.

I used to be a frequent Twitter user but the more people I followed the longer it took to keep up. If I didn’t discipline myself I wouldn’t have time to write this about it.

Rabbit

British workers put in the longest hours in Europe yet our productivity is lower than those in other major industrialised nations.

The French could take every Friday off and still achieve higher productivity than we do.

Yet UK post-Brexit prosperity lays in producing more and better goods so we can turn Britain from a low-wage economy into one with higher pay.

But instead of investing in plant, machinery and technology essential for long-term growth, business spends its money on labour because it’s cheap.

International Trade Secretary Liam Fox rabbits on about the great business opportunities outside Europe but he’s like a rabbit caught in the headlights when it comes to landing them.

Theresa May witters about an EU trade deal but to complete one before we leave on March 29, 2019, is pie charts in the sky. We must produce more.

Spending all day on Twitter clearly doesn’t help. And world champion tweeter Donald Trump is the most unproductive president in modern US history.

His tweets are not so much global diplomacy as international abuse – rubbishing Theresa May, or telling North Korea’s Kim Jong-un he’s a little on the tubby side. I s’pose I could tweet Trump back. Lots of words come to mind. One begins with W, another with T. Then a D, P, and a C.

Hey, I could play Scrabble with all the insults piling up in my head.