Productivity bites: Apple versus snow

The recent snow has, apparently, hit the UK economy to the tune of £1.35bn. That’s a lot of money and makes you wonder quite how much grit we could buy with it. 

Recently I spent six hours travelling to Oxford for a meeting that was abandoned because of snow at the last minute. In theory that’s six hours of lost time during which I could have been working. Luckily for me (and for FreshMinds) this is no longer wasted time. Now I have my iPhone. This meant that I could field emails, read the news, anticipate the length of delay of my train, call clients and generally make the best of a bad situation. I estimate that I spend about 10% of my working week travelling to meetings and back, and for at least half of that I can now take the opportunity to clear my inbox. So if of that 10% I reclaim, say, half to productive work, what impact does that make? Which makes more difference: Apple or snow?

At FreshMinds we’re often asked my clients to size markets and normally start with a back-of-an-envelope estimate to make sure we’re not miles out. I spent a bit of my train journey thinking about what impact 5% extra productive time would make on the UK economy.

UK GDP is around £23,500 per capita. If we’re working in big round numbers, let’s say that half of the population work (the actual figure is slightly less than that). But fielding emails is generally the obsession of the office worker, running around to and from meetings. Office workers make up around a third of the UK working population – there are about 10 million of them. So that’s 10 million people with the incredible potential to find an extra 5% of productivity.

iPhone sales in the UK topped 1m in February 2009 so, while UK numbers aren’t available, with the recent emergence of Vodaphone and Orange this is likely to be in the region of 2m as we move into 2010. The iPhone only has about a third of the Smart phone market though, so let’s, conservatively, assume that 6m people in the UK own a multi-functional mobile device. That’s 10% of the population. I think that office workers are earlier adopters than the general UK populous, so let’s say the penetration is 20% in this category. That’s 2m office workers with a device allowing them to each increase their productivity by 5%.

If 2m people in the UK can all find an extra 5% of time, each of these people can shift their GDP contribution to £24,675 instead. That’s £2.3bn extra per year, almost double the impact of the snow!

Please feel free to find the flaws in the methodology, the most obvious being the ability of an individual to so directly influence their per capita quota of the GDP, but maybe it’ll stop us panicking about the economy disintegrating because of a cold snap (and, in fact, Douglas McWilliams, chief executive of the Centre for Economics and Business Research, reassures us that we make up any lost productivity later in the week or month anyway). Plus I haven’t even started to add on the impact on my brainpower of constantly playing the Scrabble app.