Slashdot Mirror
A Study On Time Wasted At Work
Animesh Pathak writes "C|Net News has an article about a survey of people's goofing off habits at work. From the article: 'It's interesting to note that the Internet was cited as the leading time-wasting activity. It goes to show how integrated it has become to the daily functions of our personal and professional lives,...Today, there are so many useful tools and Web sites on the Internet that have enabled people to become more efficient with accomplishing multiple tasks in a shorter amount of time.'"
Come on, in this day and age a "scientific" study cannot possibly think it's going to say anything meaningful about wasting time at work if it considers "the internet" as one thing. Clearly, it needs to be subcategorized into meaningful elements. Maybe something like webmailers, on-line magazines, interactive discussion groups, etc. That way the researchers could seperate the waste from the worthy.
I mean, to study people wasting time on the internet is tantamount to studying people wasting time on computers.
ACSome years back in my small business I put a PC on the desk of my receptionist, around 1996 I think.
She was *supposed* to use it to do my accounting..
I didn't put it on the Internet, though she begged for it, because I wasn't about to add another phoneline for something I didn't consider important.
Rather than doing my accounting, she spent 98% of her time playing solitaire.. Nothing pissed me off worse than to walk in and see her clicking away at that frigging retarded game while on the clock.
I was paying her to play games and have a good time.
So I went in after closing and deleted the damn games.
She whined and cried about it, I told her the computer crashed and they were "eaten up"..
She managed to click around and find some other BS game to play, which I also deleted.
Again, more whining.
I then told her she was paid to work, not play games.
She said she could do her job in 45 minutes and that the rest of the day there was nothing else to do.
I would have fired her if I hadn't needed her to answer the phones and dispatch jobs. That and she was my cousins wife.. (don't hire relatives.....)
She told me if I didn't put the games back on she would quit.
Finally, cell phone service came to our area, (yes, we were very backwards here) and I fired her, took the computer home, cut 4 of my land lines and forwarded them all to my cell phone.
I know this won't work for most people, it's just my experience with employees wasting MY time and MY money...
Sadly, some employers do prefer that you stare at a blank screen. The company I work for (when I was in the home office) would not allow people to read a magazine or a book when compiling - even if it is a programming magazine/book.
"Dr. Dobbs? I don't think so - you're not in the medical profession anyway!"
BTW, that company is not the same as the one listed in my URL.
I for one welcome our new [insert main topic] overlords.
Honestly, in todays way of thinking/working, sometimes the only thing i can do to keep from going nuts is to take some time and just do nothing with it. Other countries think the US is nuts for working as much as they do... Work + no vacation = burnout... I usually spend a good hour or so a day looking around /. and other tech news, reading reviews, etc... It's about all that keeps me sane sometimes...
My employer encourages us to use the Internet. I can even read Slashdot freely, because it means that I stay up to date of what's going on in IT business. My boss says it's important part of my job. I'm a Unix system administrator.
I just had my annual review, and one of the things my boss ranked me high on was 'being informed' and 'proactively seeking solutions'. He was most impressed with the fact that I found, downloaded, and provided lots of Oracle technical information just an hour after we had decided to evaluate Oracle as a vendor. I also got high points for 'taking the lead' in learning about business rules and use cases and presenting that information to our team. Guess where I got all my information? Since the development project we worked on all year went belly up a couple of months ago, frankly cruising the 'net was the only thing I did all year that got me points in my evaluation. So which time was actually wasted? the hundreds of hours I spent on a project that was scrapped, or the time I spent on the 'net that got me bonus points with the boss?
Go figure.
Serving your airship needs since 1995.
Seriously, I expected a Funny mod for my comment. It wasn't meant seriously, but the moderation shows that there are a lot of people spending time at work that they resent - and goofing off as a form of protest.
Sure, it's never been that mythical 1950's world where the white-collar workers left for work at 8:30am and got home before 6:00pm, but we were all brought up believing that. All these companies spent lots of money advertising that living in their future would be hassle free and labour limited... Is it any surprise people don't expect to have to work hard?
Where's the Kaboom?
There's supposed to be an Earth-shattering Kaboom.
A friend of mine had a chess clock and labelled the two clocks 'work' and 'doss' (slang for not work). Whenever he was busy proving theorems, running statistical models, the 'work' clock was running. If you went into his office and asked him about the soccer game last night, he would hit the clock and 'doss' would start ticking.
His days worked out with a 50:50 work-doss ratio!
Baz
But I'm a support technician. If I'm busy it means stuff is broken and other people can't do their job. And if that's more than 1 person it's probably costing the company more than it costs them to have me sitting around doing nothing. I'm like insurance: got to have it, but using it means you have bigger problems than paying the premiums.
But I still feel like a slacker for sitting around surfing the net.
It's not fair.
Jigsaw puzzles
More puzzles
Computer Stupidities (warning: may provoke laughbursts)
Math articles
Quicktime panoramas
The world's most famous debunker
Variously educational, baffling, entertaining, or just pretty.
I figure by 2030 or so my 6-digit UID will be something to brag about.
I actually do less multitasking now than I used to. My company (nameless - like me) installed this wonderful software that bills my time to our customers, but can only track one thing at a time -- so if I work on more than one thing at a time some of my time is going unbilled. So its actually more profitable for my company if I do stare at the blank screen. Whee.
A study on life wasted at work. Now that is some seriously scary shit, man, and I am not joking here.
You can't handle the truth.
Back in the good old days of early Javascript online games (~1996 or 97), Uproar.com used to run an hourly trivia contest that paid off $5 per game. Sure, my work productivity plummeted, but I was clearing an extra $100-200 a month whiling away the day...
Stop by my site where I write about ERP systems & more
My last job began being hired as a temp when a previous guy left. They had 6 months funding for the temping post, so they said: in these 6 months, please streamline and automate all tasks so that by the time you leave, we don't need to hire a replacement.
So that's what I did.
And at the end of the six months, they said: hey, you're fitting in pretty well, do you want a permanent full-time position on 150% of the pay you had as a temp?
I said, "sure". Obviously, by that point, I had reduced the workload of the post to about 2 hours per week, like they asked me to in the first place, but if they're too stupid to notice, that's really not my problem. So I took the job. At first I was keen, and tried to make up the "missing" workload by coming up with new ideas - but after several times where these ideas just got taken into endless meetings with no outcome whatsoever, I pretty soon had that enthusiasm ground out of me.
Instead, I just pocketed the money, and spent 80% of the last year on the internet. Of course, I got all my work done, so my boss thought I was a great employee. Now I've left and they're looking for a replacement.
The real irony? This place is a business school, which boasts about having experts in "Strategic Human Resource Development". But they're still too f*cking dense to notice when they hire people for jobs they explicitly told people to render unnecessary.
Frankly, I have no idea why posts like this are moderated funny, and this is moderated 3, interesting. Both should be 5, insightful imho.
Work is, for the vast majority of the population, a stupid, pointless clock-watching waste of their life.
I personally have never seen a study been done that suggested a 40 hour work week is optimal for productivity. I would like to see some sources please.
Even if a study were to exist, you have to take into context the nature of the study. For example, to which end is the productivity rated? Is this the productivity of individual workers on a scale of work done per time unit, or is it some ratio esitimator of productivity per dollar spent, because they're quite different.
Having said that, I do agree with you. Making workers work more hours can definitely lower overall productivity.
France has enacted a law dicatating that 35 hours is the maximum time one should spend working in a week.
While they intended the law to promote hiring new employees, they found that companies resisted and instead demanded higher time unit production quotas. Indeed an interesting result.
Note that our average work week has been shortening since the 13th century.
This is definitely a good thing, although I still don't think it's enough. USA and Canada are still pretty high on the list of time spent at work.
Paul Lafargue's Right to be Lazy (1883) suggests an optimal workday of 2 to 3 hours per day.
Nearly all pre-modernized tribes peoples live with a considerably shorter work week. The Kalahari Bushmen, for example, work on average 12-20 hours per week.
Now the Bushment also don't have TV, computers, cars, planes, etc. But then again they don't have Guns, or Heroine either. And I suspect if a study were done on their happiness or contentment in life, it would probably rate _much_ higher than the average North American.
I'm not saying we should trade it all in for the life of a Bushman, but there has to be a balance. We've got the highest rates of mental disease in the world, we lock up more of our people and spend more money on incarceration per person than a lot of the countries in the world combined.
If we were really getting paid for the service of being available at work, even while we're not being productive, then we wouldn't feel guilty when we get caught reading slashdot. We wouldn't immediately switch away from minesweeper when we see the boss walking down the hall.
The workplace makes us feel like we should be productive even though there are many times when productivity is simply not going to happen.
We're tied to this 40 hour work week (which is often much higher) that forces us into a schedule that minimizes our ability to have any serious daily enjoyment beyond the workplace.
Many of us commute. After an 8 hour day and a commute, doing the daily chores, there's little time to reflect, ponder, play a game of whatever with friends.
We've been pushed into complacency and we all sit back and take it. We're a society that by enlarge lives for the weekend. I really don't consider this an optimal solution by any stretch.
Bingo ! You got to the point. Where I work at, we have flex time. I try to do my scehdule to where I work a 12 hour day on Monday, a 10 hour day on Tue, 8 on Wed, 6 on Thu and 4 on Friday. With flex time, I get in pretty early so I can leave mid-afternoon and do some things such as bike ride after work. A lot of times, it doesn't work out since our East Coast counterparts who live to work always have these last minute demands on Thu or Fri and expect us in Colorado to drop everything for their whims.
I work to live, not live to work ! Unfortunately, corporate America looks down on enjoying life which is supposedly reserved for the executives who are miserable anyway.
We're tied to this 40 hour work week (which is often much higher) that forces us into a schedule that minimizes our ability to have any serious daily enjoyment beyond the workplace.
Many of us commute. After an 8 hour day and a commute, doing the daily chores, there's little time to reflect, ponder, play a game of whatever with friends.
We've been pushed into complacency and we all sit back and take it. We're a society that by enlarge lives for the weekend. I really don't consider this an optimal solution by any stretch.
In an office filled with coworkers incessantly chitter-chattering among themselves about nothing of any consequence, it's sometimes a wonder I get anything done at all. I estimate about a third of my "work" time is spent losing my train of thought due to the incessant meaningless chatter and then attempting to regain it.
Losing my train of thought due to the ringing phone and then attempting to regain it afterwards also accounts for a significant portion of my time, but there's nothing my employer could do about that; we have to answer the phone, of course.
Cut that out, or I will ship you to Norilsk in a box.