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Web Surfing At Work Can Boost Productivity
An anonymous reader writes "The Wall Street Journal reports on a study into productivity and efficiency in the workplace, which found that people who are given a break to surf the web return to their work with 'lower levels of mental exhaustion, boredom and higher levels of engagement.' Researchers tested against two other groups; one continued working, and one was given a break that did not involve web browsing. They concluded that 'browsing the Internet serves an important restorative function.' In contrast, dealing with personal email was 'particularly distracting.' In the end, the researchers recommended that employers loosen restrictions on employee web access."
This backs up a similar study out of Australia from a couple years ago.
no shit
That's why we're here. At least, those of us who aren't independently wealthy or basement-dwelling leaches. :)
sig: sauer
After all, no one can tell the difference between surfing the 'Net for fun and me actually doing my job.
I think it is well-known that people are not dumb automata for a while now. In fact, I think "people over process" could apply to a lot more jobs too.
This is trivially true as long as relaxation doesn't mean distraction.
Sent as ripples into the electromagnetic field. No single photon has been harmed in the process.
...but that's not the corporations opinion, please try again.
-- Managment
Don't know... been surfing since 9 am (it is 12:15 now) and being Monday don't feel like doing Jack...
A coworker just came by and he started off with famous cliche, "So, are you working hard or hardly working?"
I chuckle.
We stood for the next 30 minutes discussed everything from current political realities in Middle East to the greatest newest phone gadget on a market.
Yup that's how my day goes.
Someone once told me that out of 8 hours we only in reality work like 1. The rest we pretend. I tend to believe that.
As the guy that monitors web traffic for the whole company, I have to believe the enormous amount of time employees spend on FaceBook isn't helping productivity. On the other hand, I am here...
to create a record of my idle surfing, so that I have evidence of my productivity increase.
Can't wait for the next research resulting in this headline:
Watching Porn and Jerking Off Increases Work Productivity (and lowers violence).
You can't handle the truth.
In the country where I grew up, the lunch break was 2 hour long, while the class day was 4 hours in the morning and 4 in the afternoon. So you started school at 8am and finished at 6pm. That's an awful long day for north-american standards (start at 8 something and out before 2:30pm). Yet, I see an identical situation with TFA: when we returned to our class on the afternoon we were rested and had a second peak of productivity, while the kids in north-america have only one and by the time they reach 2pm, they're exhausted.
JigJag
"The hallmark of humanity is the ability to move beyond sensory inputs" - Mary Helen Immordino-Yang
Biased result - what they should have done was give people a set amount of time work to do, gave them the same amount of money, and then measured the productivity of the two groups. Instead, they put the first group to work for the full 30 minutes and then gave the second group 20 minutes of work, a break to browse the web for 10 minutes, then 10 more minutes of work. A break gives you more productivity on tedious tasks like highlighting every letter 'e' in a Word document? Duh! At least it was done in Singapore so we know no U.S. tax dollars were spent on such an obvious conclusion.
How about people who don't work at all but screw around on the web all day? Giving them the same amount of money for work or no work would answer that question. I know for a fact some people will sit around all day at work commenting on their friends' facebook status, checking twitter, watching Youtube with headphones on, and reading celebrity news. Heck, I've done my fair share of wasting time, too..."Honest boss, I need to check Slashdot all day to...uh...stay current in tech trends!" (to be fair this was back in 2001 when this website was a different place)
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
recess is needed as well to many fat kids now days
Also, hitting on women at work CAN get you laid. Strangely it also CAN get you fired.
Where does the signature go?
not that i am complaining, as this is exactly how i use slashdot (he said, posting from work), and i think this is true of most other people here
slashdot would materially suffer from a workplace that blocked outside surfing
i would further add that the articles i read on slashdot have benefited me at work, such as with the recent spate of articles covering development on the android: i bring these subjects up in meetings with my coworkers and superiors and employees under me
the web at work is not about porn or gambling sites. unfortunately, that's the only way some management views the issue. you can walk a middle road: black list sites of only a certain nature. for example: block porntube.com, don't block cnn.com
furthermore, if you do have an employee looking at porn or gambling from work, you are dealing with someone whose comfort level with certain kinds of transgressions at work that they are probably transgressing in other ways at work as well. meaning, blocking their web access is not the way to deal with them, and doesn't solve the problem of the other possible transgressions they are probably engaging in, perhaps against the company. keep an eye at them at least, or better yet, terminate them. anyone surfing porn or gambling from work has issues
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
I can think of a number of times I've gotten stuck on a scripting problem, distracted myself on the web for a couple of minutes, then come back and have had the solution become clear to me. I don't really know why this happens but I suspect it's because I'm willing to dump where I'm at and start over from the beginning to look for the problem. Im not sure how much sense that makes so I'll put it another way: I needed a mental reboot.
I don't personally believe productivity takes any real hit from web broswing. Even if it did, I think the info that is gathered from it can make up or even exceed that gap. I had a boss ding me once for talking to someone on ICQ. A month or two later he needed me to find some info. I knew the dude from ICQ had experience with that particular product and he was kind enough to fill me in. My boss was reasonable enough to take back the comment he made.
"I like to lick butts!" by MobileTatsu-NJG (#32700246) (Score:5, Informative)
This is indeed why I am mostly here.
However today I still need to kill 30min before I have 'worked' my official 8h of the day
What I find more hampering my productivity however are these bullshit landscape environments. I have 40 people around with 16 of them in my close vicinity in that I can hear their personal and business phone calls, their social talk about boring stuff (boring to me) and all.
On my previous job I could develop from home and just come in once a week to have meetings. Now I feel it's like trying to develop in the food court in the mall on black friday.
I haven't worked in years, but I am relaxed and rested.
here's a picture of a lolcat.
Now get back to work!
until managers actually start paying attention?
And, for that matter, why do we need studies that prove being locked in a cave is emotionally crushing and bad for productivity?
Sure, it might help occasionally, but the opportunities for it to harm productivity seem more likely to occur more often.
If employees keep it down to like maybe 30 minutes a day and no more and are self disciplined than I do not have a problem.
However, I am a big of the book Its called Work For A Reason by Larry Winget. Basically, he mentioned studies showed that people only work 40% of the time in the office. The rest is chatting, reading email, stretching, and browsing the web.
In the past, I worked at crappy jobs where you could not goof off at all. My first job was fastfood in highschool. I did retail work after that too where you constantly had to load shelves, talk to customers, and run cash registers and so on. You think I had the luxury of browsing the web? Or even txting on the phone? In these jobs I made $15,000 a year. Shouldn't I work even harder if I make $40,000 a year? If I browse the web for 3 hours with 4 other co-workers then I waste a whole workers pay/productivity. Over a year that costs $40,000 in lost productivity. How is that different from me taking money from the cash register at my previous jobs?
I am out of work at the moment and it drives me crazy to see people with lower work ethics keeping their jobs. I always try to look at it from the view of the owner and customer. If I am wating for a Latte at Starbucks I do not want to see employees browsing the web on their IPAD while I wait or browsing the web in the managers office. I want their butt making my coffee. I would then be a hypocrit to sit on my butt at work.
People can easily work twice as hard and this recession is finally forcing employees to do just that ... well some
http://saveie6.com/
Most of the websites blocked here are known malware hosts, sites that link to known malware hosts, and social networking sites that offer too many vectors for infiltraiton.
It's not about appropriateness, it's about data security. Which is, here, appropriate.
Mind you, I rarely feel refreshed after browsing Slashdot any more. And I wouldn't hit Fark here at work, you never know what you'll get.
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
recess is needed as well to many fat kids now days
Not a part of NCLB testing, has to be cut. Teach to the test, and only teach to the test, that is all. Seriously, that's what happened.
More recess, requires a major cultural change, not a minor scheduling change.
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
Did they do a control group with coffee breaks and informal meetings? I wager those serve a similar function. Note, informal meeting as in "gathering by Joe's cube" as opposed to "everybody called into the conference room to view PowerPoint from some director who flew in from Dallas". The latter is most likely a severe productivity killer for everybody involved.
I find it interesting that the people who should read this, are banned from browsing the internet during work hours, and as such will probably never read it.
I could name a few business and government organizations but I won't.
If it wasn't surfing the web, it would be something else, going for a walk to the coffee machine, staring off into space. Anything to give yourself a break from the current task at hand.
If you get the days work done what does it matter? Unfortunately HR droids and the like see it as "You're stealing x amount time off the company, you could be x amount more productive". Almost like the mythical man month etc.
FYI, in reality none of us have a 35 hour week... except for government employees.
productivity skyrockets.
I'm a planner, mostly. I think of ways to fix problems and improve my company's network systems. Not only is reading Slashdot "productive" for me, so is sitting around at home watching a movie and eating popcorn.
The point is, I'm paid salary, not hourly. It doesn't matter how much time I'm given, I just have to complete all tasks, period. So, if I want to show up at work and screw around on Slashdot, or Google+ or whatever, it means nothing. Either my job gets done or not. If it continually doesn't get done, I won't have a job to return to.
At this very moment, I have at least 5 other things that I need to work on, yet I'm posting here. Why? If I get them done now, I can leave early. Otherwise, I'll be here for a lot longer. But, as anyone in IT knows, don't got changing every damn thing on the network if you don't like chaos. ;) I'll update a client after I post. I'll call a Cisco engineer when I'm done with that. I'll screw around on Google+ after that, maybe post a ICanHazCheesburger picture after that, then check on my daily backups, then load balance the VM cloud, then I might even *gasp* check out some ladies in bikinis.
It's my job, my responsibilities, my choice how to spend my time. What time do they get from me? I've had to stay until 3am without any overtime pay to make sure email is working at 6am. Most of the time I sat watching the server transfer on one monitor, and watching Star Trek TNG on Netflix on my phone.
Anyone who has a complaint about that can find someone else willing to do my job, at my pay, with the same dedication, and with no goof-off time*. Haha, yeah, good luck with that!
I've had manual labor jobs, and no, the only perk there is listening to music. It's not the same, and you can't screw around on an hourly job, imho.
* btw, my "goof-off" time is usually reading on tech, which constantly improves my performance.
I8-D
...this web surfing session to read this article?
The idea that a thinking job is more exhausting than a labouring job is absurd. Probably a product of some fantasy world you inhabit.
I have had programming jobs and before I worked in computing I had a labouring job for over three years. The labouring job was heavy work kept me fit and strong but left me exhausted at the end of the day. I needed to eat lots to keep up the energy levels and slept well. It was great work in some ways but draining.
When I moved over to computing as an administrator then migrated over to programming it obviously took a lot more brain power but by comparison with the labouring job it was not tiring. At the end of the day I was not exhausted and I was able to go out of an evening without ruining the next work day. The pay was and is better too.
The worst jobs I have had have been the worst paid while the easiest, most enjoyable, most interesting work has been the best paid.
An education buys you into an elite club which gets you the interesting work and you get paid a relatively high amount for doing it as an added bonus. The labourers get the toughest work and the bum pay too.
There's nothing fair about pay scales.
See subject-line above, & ANY coder OR network techs/admins/engineers here will tell you that much, that much I am certain of (because nobody ALIVE I've ever met can hold all the details &/or idiosyncracies the "art & science" of computing has within its MANY facets - knowing the question to ask is STEP #1, & then it's working on principles you gained via education & experience after that... using the resources the web provides helps!)
E.G.-> Especially sites like Microsoft's MSDN & TechNet sites (same with networking personnel too on this note really). Recently, since I've taken up learning Python more avidly, it too qualifies (like any programming language I suppose does when you come right down to it).
So, Yes - WebSurfing can "save your behind" in fact vs. problematic issues that others have solved before you have (or, @ least something close enough to where you can figure it out based on problems they solved, or units/classes they put out for common consumption...).
* So, thank goodness for the internet is about all I can say... there's times it's saved my behind, & I am SURE I am NOT ALONE here in that capacity in either coding, or networking/techie work in computing.
APK
P.S.=> I remember when the net, or even rather the volume of technical computing information on it ESPECIALLY NOWADAYS, just wasn't generally widely available. Things were tougher, books notwithstanding, & no questions asked on that account!... apk
KNOWN bad sites/servers/hosts-domains, adbanners of all kinds, botnet C&C servers, & maliciously scripted sites + those who are KNOWN servers of malware-in-general, via a custom HOSTS file I've built up since 1997 from nearly 20 reputable & reliable sources... & that # noted above, grows here steadily, every 15 minutes via a Python script system for its ongoing fortification (which grows usually to the tune of 300-5,000 per day or so, depending on the day, sometimes even MORE (I've seen it go up to 15,000 new known bogus ones in a day before for example)).
So... I guess I just don't see your point man!
I.E.-> I can get to a good 99.9% of the sites the news bulletins/threads here point to as sources (unless they're ones that are "paywalled" like the NYTimes are lately, that is)...
APK
P.S.=> I don't just use HOSTS either, but also firewall rules tables + DNS servers that filter out spamming/phishing & the same "malware-in-general" as noted above in Norton DNS, Open DNS, & ScrubIT DNS all working in tandem together & AdBlock + others browsers add ons (like WOT etc. & IE TPL's etc.)...
Same deal, even through THAT many "layers of defense" here: Again - I rarely, IF EVER, hit sites here I cannot reach & when it happens, it's usually "paywalls" like NYTimes is for the past year or so now in their source articles! Perhaps you meant links POSTERS here post? I have the same general luck there too though usually (though I DO get more "blocked" ones on that note, admittedly).
Did I misunderstand you somehow, sorry if so, but... sounds like you're saying the links here point to bogus sites/servers/hosts-domains, etc.- et al ...
... apk
That IF they were "breached"? You'd DEFINITELY hear it from the rooftops (healthcare & insurance data)... & from what I saw in 1 place?? THERE WERE VERY vulnerable!
(E.G./I.E.-> I was hired to secure their code doing SFTP data transfers & using .NET (ASP.NET/VB.NET code mostly))...
So, sure, I did MY end of it: However, WHEN I complained that "sure, I am locking the doors, but you folks are leaving the windows wide open", more-or-less (leaving endpoints unsecured mainly, the DBA & coders did THEIR work properly)?
Heh... when I pointed it out to the network engineers (mainly the then CIO)? Man - I got FIRED for it!
I couldn't believe it man... I wasn't WILLING to "sign off"/put my rubber stamp on things UNTIL those things were done alongside securing code &/or processes... what use is THAT, when the barn doors may be locked, but the WINDOWS ARE WIDE OPEN, I ask you?
I think you get my point!
(E.G.-> The then CIO (a paper MCSE type, very little experience) had setup, for example, TREND micro antivirus from a central server ALL WRONG, was not working & 6++ months OUT OF DATE no less, & systems there were crawling with keyloggers for example!).
I pointed out tools that help secure endpoint workstations nodes (CIS Tool, multiplatform no less & highly esteemed + useful &/or MBSA by MS) to help with that, & in automating it! Logon scripts & .reg file merges + centralized group & security policy tools in Windows can automate the rest... any GOOD network engineer/tech KNOWS this too!
Still - It got me fired, & for trying to show them WHERE & HOW + WHY they were wrong in terms of security... & because I would NOT "sign off/put my rubber stamp of approval" on a job that I did MY end of, but not the other end of it (networking stuff in security).
APK
P.S.=> NOW - As far as other things he OUGHT to have been doing & going along the lines of what YOU noted, about "being in control of security"? DNSBL's good stuff as well!
Ones such as this one (pretty reliable, there are others like it I utilizing & convert to HOSTS data here also) -> http://doc.emergingthreats.net/bin/view/Main/HoneywallSamples
I pointed stuff out like THAT too, but... Think they took my advice? No...
However - In the end though??
The CIO & THE CTO got fired (from what I understand, for using AVG freeware in a corporate environs no less... very, Very, VERY unprofessional, & also iirc, against the law too!))...
Yes folks - That's what you get with "fake-it-till-you-make-it/paper MCSE's" @ the wheel out there in mgt. in the art & science of computing though... I am sure you've seen it too!
... apk
For future defence.
Somehow, I don't think I'm alone in this.
I we surf at work and my productivity is through the roof. I already did my grocery shopping online, got my plane ticket and hotel for next weekend, got a toy for a friend's son BDay, reasearched latest LED TVs, movies for tonight... definitely web surfing at work has improved my personal productivity. Now I will be totally free after work. Thanks Slashdot!