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.'"
The article did mention that not all waste is pure waste, as they could spark new ideas, and it's also likely to introduce ice-breaking topics so that everybody can sit together and chat about something in common.
Nowadays companies expect employees to be available from 7.30am to 6.30pm, but these employees aren't actually required all the time, the boss just wants you to be there so that when he needs you, he can find you.
The article mentions insurance industry is the worst, but what do they expect insurance call centre staff to do when nobody calls in?
Maybe start cold-calling: "Good morning Mr Anderson, this is Smith from Surely Insurance, we're wondering if you have a car accident today?"
So I normally treat non-productive time as time-out or standby periods for employees, they're getting paid to provide continuous service availability throughout the day.
Rock that crushes, Paper & Scissors that don't matter.
I find this story deeply ironic. Only two hours until I can leave this place...
Area IV, here I am
Wasting time on the Internet at work...what...like reading Slashdot? The powers that be will never catch me doing such a thing...
Oh shit, here comes the boss....
+++ATH
NO CARRIER
"Lame" - Galaxar
All I need to do is just walk around the office.
And here I am, still at work, posting on Slashdot....
When you get to hell -- tell 'em Itchy sent ya!
Just who is the target audience for this? Whip-wielding managers who flay anyone not fast enough on Alt-Tab?
Where's the Kaboom?
There's supposed to be an Earth-shattering Kaboom.
How much time do you waste at work reading Slashdot?
* 1hr/week
* 1hr/day
* 2hrs/day
* 3hrs/day
* I don't read slashdot you insensitive clod (then what are you doing selecting this one)
* CowboyNeal
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
I'd say in a given week I probably only do about fifteen minutes of real, actual, work.
but I was too busy playing Internet Scrabble.
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.
ACWould it save my employer anything for me to be staring at the blank screen instead?
===== Murphy's Law is recursive. =====
with my slashdot addiction.
Please, someone make me stop. It's taking up all my time. I've started writing songs about it, so when I lose my job and am out on the street I'll have something to sing while I panhandle.
This is a lot harder to kick than nicotene, crack, heroin, alcohol, meth, overeating, bulemia, and necrophilia were.
Raise your children as if you were teaching them to raise your grandchildren, because you are.
I'd possibly do more in a given day, but I'd also be much less informed. Quite a few purchase decisions, new technology concepts, and water-cooler-conferences are based around news/ideas I pick up on the net...
And to go a bit further, without forums, reference sites, online howto's, and last-but-not-least the almighty google I'd would be nearly as efficient as I am at work... having a server bork with mysterious driver issues is quite often solved with part inuition/experience and part googling the error messages...
sit down and sign in ASAP read email
read slashdot
read news
rews world of warcraft forums
talk to co workers
check slashdot for new articles
attempt to hope i can come up with a witty response to an article...
then.. do work?
ps
someone came up to me while i was typing this (im at work now) and read it. wonder what they thought of it. hehe.
I remember as a child being promised in TV programs about the future a shorter working week, increased leisure time, and robots and computers doing more of the work.
Instead I'm expected to be available 12 hours out of 24 instead of 8. So, when the machine is doing the job for me, or I need to take a break from a problem and come back fresh, why the hell shouldn't I goof off on the Internet. My parents' generation did it with newspapers - even if they had to lock themselves in the toilet to do so.
Where's the Kaboom?
There's supposed to be an Earth-shattering Kaboom.
Through a Web survey involving more than 10,000 employees, the report found that personal Internet surfing ranked as the top method of cooling one's heels at work.
Gee, most people on a web survey spend their personal time on the Internet. Thats like going to to a Red Sox game and surveying people on what their favorite sport is! I'll post again in a few, but for right now, I'm going to go to a strip club and survey people on womens' rights.
Just open up about 10 important sites on different tabs (in my case, PDF's of different Phys Rev or Nano Letters papers), open whatever you're surfing on the 11th tab, say arstechnica^H^H^Hslashdot. Boss comes by, just flick your mouse to the tab bar and quickly scroll the mouse wheel some. You have a 10/11 chance of landing on a work-related site. It's like playing Russian Roulette, sort of, except in the US. OTOH, in Soviet Russia, Russian Roulette plays...never mind.
Some 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...
You never know who else is wasting time at work: http://bash.org/?258908
It must be Windows. It needs half a gig of RAM and a hardware-accelerated graphics card just to run Solitaire.
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.
It is what you do with the time you dedicate to your job. My employer whats certain things done. I have timelines. As long as I meet or exceed those timelines they are more than happy.
Yes it has been commented that I surf a lot. However to have your VP rebut that comment with praise for the quality and consistency of your work does say that some people do get it.
Hell there are people not making calls or surfing that waste more of a companies time just by being there. I cannot tally the number of hours spent doing something someone else supposedly did. I cannot tally the hours spent on some high level persons personal directive that only was tossed at a later date.
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
ChrisLMB : If any of my employees did that they'd be fired instantly.
Ben174 : Where u work?
ChrisLMB : I'm the CTO at LowerMyBills.com
*** Ben174 (BenWright@TeraPro33-41.LowerMyBills.com) Quit (Leaving)
http://www.bash.org/?258908/
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.
I am still somewhat amazed that people fail to see "The Internet" for what it is -- a communications medium.
I use Television, Telephone, Radio, Cell phone, FAX, Newspapers and even the U.S. Postal service. None of these things are thought to be remarkable, ground-breaking or otherwise remarkable media. They aren't new but they are certainly very well integrated into the way we do business.
People are, instead, distracted by the newness and novelty of the applications that use the internet medium. We all know how people think "the web" == "the internet" and how wrong that is. So here again, we're talking about how the internet is changing the way we do business. It is and it isn't. We have a new medium with which we exchange information. In some ways it's superior to existing media and in other ways it's not. As the dust settles, people will use the medium that works best for their use. The Net obsoletes nothing specifically.
I could be playing golf and working on my novel!
TFA says that work days are getting longer because people are wasting more time. That's a load of crap. I "waste" time because of the long hours. I'm not mentally capable of coding 100% 24/7. The reality is that there are a limited # of hours in the day that I can effectively develope in. If you tell me I have to be here, I'll just sit and read slashdot. If I could leave the office without management frowning on a less than 40 hour week then I could just do an 8-4 every day and I would not *have* to slack off.
OK, I know it's bad form to respond to my own post, but reading more about this "survey" really raises my ire about the willingness of the media to report junk surveys. This survey was all over the local news yesterday, mostly because my state (Missouri) was the chief time waster. Even the governor had to respond to the media saying that we Missourians aren't a bunch of lazy workers.
But then if you look at the "methodology" of this survey (see bottom), you'll see there wasn't a shred of science in this. Not only was the audience surveyed limited to AOL users, Survey.com users, and HR professionals, but the "data was analyzed by Salary.com's team of Certified Compensation Professionals." What the hell is a "Certified Compensation Professional" and what do they know about statistics and surveys?
The media needs to be a little more responsible in writing news stories based on something as weak as an online survey that had no scientific sampling or margin of error associated with it. If anything this proves that reporters are the lazy workers here.
I can identify my boss's footsteps in a high traffic area at least 20 yards away to trigger an Alt-Tab.
--Chag
I'm amazed that there's no mention of smoking in the article at all. I wonder if it was even considered. Our workplace, like many others recently, has gone smoke free which means all the smokers are likely to disappear for 1/2 hour or more 3-4 times a day to get off the grounds to have a smoke. Some even get around the "no smoking on any company property" rule by standing in the street. It may not be the number one time waster, but it'd got to be up there.
I am reading this at work, I have not read the article, do they mention /. specifically?
People sleep peaceably in their beds at night only because rough men stand ready to do violence on their behalf.
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.
Peter: Yeah.
Bob: Great.
Peter: Well, I generally come in at least fifteen minutes late, ah, I use the side door - that way Lumbergh can't see me, heh - after that I sorta space out for an hour.
Bob: Da-uh? Space out?
Peter: Yeah, I just stare at my desk, but it looks like I'm working. I do that for probably another hour after lunch too, I'd say in a given week I probably only do about fifteen minutes of real, actual, work.
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.
Slashdot, beyond the way the trolls word things, is a great place to find best-practices for the IT world.
Thank you, that's the funniest thing I've read all day.
SIERRA TANGO FOXTROT UNIFORM
The SlashTitle made me think of:
...
1. Extended meetings where people aimlessly mull and nothing is produced
2. Following ingrained procedures which triple the time to do simple activities
3. Reinstalling failing software and OSes
But then it's about what people do with their spare time?? I want solutions to the above!!!
8-PP
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.