Slashdot Mirror
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.
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)
here's a picture of a lolcat.
Now get back to work!
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
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.
productivity skyrockets.
Every now and then I'll decide that I need to work harder to get ahead, so I'll completely swear off the internet for a day. By 11 am I'll have noticed that I've just been staring at the diagram without doing anything for 30 minutes. Something to break up the monotony is very important.
Is 1563649 a prime number?
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
In these jobs I made $15,000 a year. Shouldn't I work even harder if I make $40,000 a year?
Um... No.
You should, however, provide more value to your employer, exercise a high demand skill that is in relatively low supply, create value, etc. People who ask "you want fries with that?" in exchange for $7 an hour should clue in that literally any idiot can do that, and if they want more, they are going to have to distinguish themselves somehow.
Of course, your first problem seems to be that you are laboring under the delusion that life is (or is supposed to be) fair. Never was, and is not likely to become so before you or I die.
... your first problem seems to be that you are laboring under the delusion that life is (or is supposed to be) fair. Never was, and is not likely to become so before you or I die.
On the other hand, one should not let the existence of this state of unfairness become the excuse for not attempting to destroy it, for doing nothing to mitigate its effects, or, worse, for promoting it as a good.
That is all.
...this web surfing session to read this article?
On the other hand, one should not let the existence of this state of unfairness become the excuse for not attempting to destroy it, for doing nothing to mitigate its effects, or, worse, for promoting it as a good.
At age 43, I have despaired of hope that I will make a significant change in the "state of fairness" for myself, or my children. I do attempt to deal with those immediately around me in a fair manner, but I'm not taking any significant hits to the family wealth by giving it away because it is unfair that others have less. No matter what your station in life, there are always others who have less, well, at least that's true for 99.9999999% of every Billion people.
I witnessed the results of Communism (a very fair sounding philosophy) in 1990 in East Germany, I don't think that version of fair was much good. In the 21 years since then, I have watched the United States plunge ever deeper into the "I've got mine, so screw you" philosophy of fairness, and, although I vote, and occasionally advocate on behalf of "fairness," I don't see my personal efforts making much of a difference.
In my opinion, crying about how unfair it all is doesn't do any good, but denying that a state of unfairness exists is even worse.
Full time at your previous jobs created less value than part timers created at the 40k job. That's how it's different. I used to feel the same way, but some people really do create more value than others. Who cares if the roadie is working longer hours than the rock star? The rock star's the one bringing in the ticket sales to pay for both of them.
That's at work where I don't manage anything. The list is dynamic except for the social sites.
My mail server has deny and block methods dating to 1993. Not just blacklists and up blocks but dynamic stuff and intrusion scripts that block stuff variably. I know just ham-handed denies are pointless, but at work they also do DLP and watch every byte looking for patterns that match confidential data. If they see data leaked out in the field, they go back and see if it was seen leaving us.
If we failed to secure our data, you would read about it everywhere. E v e r y w h e r e.
It's not a job I want any more.
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
For future defence.
Somehow, I don't think I'm alone in this.
But if people work twice as hard and productivity increases, wouldn't that make it necessary for companies to hire even fewer workers, and increase unemployment even more?
I get what you are saying, but the McDonalds to the current office job is a difference b/w work hard, and work smart. In Mickie D's, no real thinking is required, and all that's required there is your presence, and your doing all the jobs you're required to - flipping the burgers, making sure that the next batch of fries are underway, matching the orders against the numbers, and so on.
You are also assuming that there is always going to be work on an employee, regardless of the status of the A/R he's working on. I was a Product Marketing Engineer in a memory company, and a lot of my work used to be to manage the request of designs of new memory products for customers. My part of the job used to be to do the business analysis on whether a project was justified, and once it was, to put together the the inputs engineering needed to work on the projects. Once I was done, I was pretty much idle, unless new requests came in to fill up more of my time. Of course, I had other marketing duties to keep me occupied, but even there, once I had done my part and passed it over to the next person (like defining what the product page website should look like), my time was pretty much idle unless they came back to me.
So like others have said above, it's not like just b'cos a person is employed that he always has plenty to do. If an organization is lucky and has people versatile enough to perform several tasks, you'll see such people w/ a high work utilization. In the company I mention, however, we had a very fragmented marketing organization and so everybody had a very limited sandbox in which both the role was limited, and so was the growth opportunities. That's another topic altogether, but it's not like there's always stuff to do. I much prefer people who browse and even watch porn to those who gossip endlessly near the water cooler - something described as a toxic employee in Dilbert.
We do only do 40 at most though. Which seems to be the minimum amount in america rather than a limit.
"The space elevator will be built about 50 years after everyone stops laughing." - Arthur C. Clarke ~1980
Did you just pick random articles from a google search? :p One of them actually concludes using the internet can increase productivity and its hard to measure how much it affects it. Another says that social networks can increase productivity but that it can make you distant to your friends and possibly reduce engagement that way. And the other 2 articles are just business guidelines with no data.
"The space elevator will be built about 50 years after everyone stops laughing." - Arthur C. Clarke ~1980