The Most Disruptive Events of 2018

Ah 2018, the year of the Super Bowl selfie kid, Fortnite, and “A Star Is Born.” These movements, and more, dramatically impacted the cultural landscape of 2018. Don’t even get us started on the sheer volume of Ally and Jackson Maine Halloween costumes this year.

All of these trends got us thinking — what major events occurred during the workday, and what were the most disruptive events for productivity? We’d previously reported that Kanye had the ability to drastically decrease work-rate, but we wanted to identify even more events that caused productivity fluctuations.

Related: Why Meditation Is The Next Big Productivity Tool

With thousands of companies utilizing Hive as their all-in-one project management tool, we were able to extract a bit of data on productivity via Hive Analytics. So, read on to learn about some of the most disruptive events for productivity in 2018.

Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg has had a rough 2018. On April 10th, when he had to testify about Facebook’s involvement in the recent election (his stoic posture and facial expressions were the subject of quite a few memes), productivity dropped 19%.

Kanye has been known to dabble in the occasional lengthy soliloquy on Twitter, and he has a particularly potent diatribe on April 25th. His Tweets, which were politically-tinged and Pro-Trump, brought productivity down by 55%.

The World Cup is essentially a month-long party fueled by endless soccer matches. But one of the biggest games of the 2018 World Cup? The Spain vs Portugal game. And it was at 2 PM. Total productivity during those hours dropped 15%.

The long drawn-out trial and sentencing of Bill Cosby came to a close at 4:30 PM on September 25th. At exactly 4:30 PM, productivity dropped 32%. This sentencing came after a 2017 mistrial and accusations that dated as far back as 1965.

On the day of Dr. Ford and Kavanaugh’s testimony, productivity dropped 31% at 10 AM when Dr. Ford began testifying. Productivity dropped another 70% once Kavanaugh took the stand later that day. This is in line with the television viewership throughout the day, which peaked at 13 million viewers when Kavanaugh testified, between 3:15 and 6:45 PM.

Aka the video that broke YouTube. So many people stopped what they were doing to watch Ariana’s highly anticipated “Thank U, Next” video that YouTube’s comment section actually “broke” momentarily. Her video was the fastest video ever to reach 100 million views on YouTube, and exactly at its 3 PM debut, productivity fell 57%. By 5 PM, productivity was back to normal.

So, what have we learned? Ariana Grande’s “Thank U, Next” was a global movement and people, rightfully, spent time watching and educating themselves on the Kavanaugh Hearings. Oh, and Kanye West “tweets.”

2018, you were filled with triumphs and trials. Thank u, next.