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.'"

Comments

Standby Periods

[fembots]

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.

Re:Standby Periods

[centauri]

"Good morning Mr Anderson, this is Smith from Surely Insurance, we're wondering if you're having a car accident today...."

Imagine Hugo Weaving speaking this to you over the phone as you drive home from work and give yourself a nice shiver.

Re:Standby Periods

[ShaniaTwain]

I would formulate a clever and insightful reply to your post, but I should really get back to work.

Re:Standby Periods

[Nos.]

They even say that roughly 1/3 or respondants say they "waste" this time because they have don't have enough work.

Near the bottom of the salary.com article is this little blurb:
Populations surveyed included AOL users, Salary.com Salary Wizard users and corporate human resource professionals

So, a good portion of the surveyed group are visitors to salary.com. I would guess that a majority of people visiting salary.com are at least somewhat unhappy with their job. I don't think I would consider they're numbers worth anything. Its like asking people coming out of a theatre if they're willing to pay current admission prices to see a movie.

Re:Standby Periods

[soliptic]

Yeah damn straight.

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.

Ha!

[building_970]

I find this story deeply ironic. Only two hours until I can leave this place...

Re:Ha!

[MarkGriz]

"This is your boss. This is even more ironic than you thought, because, all us at management are watching this story."

Management discussing other people wasting time.

Now that's REAL irony.

You'll never catch me...

[Crudely_Indecent]

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

I don't need a study to prove this...

[808paulson]

All I need to do is just walk around the office.

Time waster

[Reducer2001]

And here I am, still at work, posting on Slashdot....

What a nice report

[Ronald Dumsfeld]

Just who is the target audience for this? Whip-wielding managers who flay anyone not fast enough on Alt-Tab?

Initech

[iamzack]

I'd say in a given week I probably only do about fifteen minutes of real, actual, work.

Re:Initech

[Valiss]

Yes, I get the reference. BUT....

The beauty of that is if you do 30 minutes of work a week, you can tell your boss that you've DOUBLED the productivity!

i have my routine set for when i come to work...

[tont0r]

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.

Increased Leisure Time

[Ronald Dumsfeld]

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.

Um, am I the only one...

[ISaidItOmega]

... that feels like this study is stupid? From TFA:

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.

the internet and solitaire.

[pair-a-noyd]

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...

Re:the internet and solitaire.

[_RidG_]

That's absolutely ridiculous, provided that it was indeed the case that her work only took up 45 minutes of the day. Could you reasonably expect a sane person to sit at his / her desk five days a week, 8 hours every day, and do absolutely nothing for 7 hours and 15 minutes at a time?

I don't quite understand this logic. You are paying her to do her job, i.e. answer phones and do accounting. As long as that condition is satisfied, let her be. Your employees are people too, though by the hostile tone displayed throughout your post, it seems that there is certainly some bad blood there.

Re:the internet and solitaire.

[NeoSkandranon]

If the real reason you kept her around all day (as opposed to having her come in, do the work, and clock out) is so she could answer phones, why's it her fault that she didn't have other tasks to do after the 45 minutes of accounting work?

The way you make it sound is that she literally had no other tasks to perform (if this isn't hte case *please* correct me as it changes your story completely) --so what would you have had her do? start shampooing the carpet or something like that?

Obligatory Bash.org Quote

[Aeron65432]

Ben174 : If they only realized 90% of the overtime they pay me is only cause i like staying here playing with Kazaa when the bandwidth picks up after hours.
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/

Is It Really Wasted Time?

[airship]

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.

100% of my time is wasted at work.

[Radical Rad]

I could be playing golf and working on my novel!

Re:This explains it all

[zookie]

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.

Wasted Time and The 40 Hour Week

[Chagatai]

Keep in mind that studies over the past hundred years have shown that the 40-hour workweek is optimal for productivity. When workers are now putting in an average of 50 hours per week, with even lower productivity because of those excess hours, I would argue that the "wasted" time during the week is actually increasing productivity, if anything. And like other posters have said, this "wasted" time is often intermingled with productive work. For instance, I am in a class after having finished a lab right now.

Re:Wasted Time and The 40 Hour Week

[flithm]

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.

Smoke breaks?

[the-matt-mobile]

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.