Monday, September 5, 2005

Wasting Time at Work

CNet is running an article titled American workers: Lazy or creative?, based on a time-wasting survey run by Salary.com. The average number of hours the survey respondents reported wasting was 2.09, double what managers expected their employees to waste. Managers also thought that women wasted more time than men, when it's actually about equal. "Personal internet usage," including web surfing, email, and IM, was the largest single activity people did instead of work, with almost 45% of respondents admitting to it.

Wonder if there's any truth to their theory that workers are compensating for longer hours, on-call-ness, and being expected to check things like work email over the weekends. Or are people just giving in to the temptation of non-work fun activities, that have become increasingly available from their office desk?

So, how many hours of work a day do you waste?

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3 comments:

Shelley: the Dread Pirate Rodgers said...

More accurately, I would like to see the question posed as "how many hours of the day do I waste with work?" :-)

Aaron *@ said...

I think any and all time I waste at work is far offset by the fact that I don't mind working on the more interesting parts of my job off the clock at home. Then there's those "Aha!" shower moments that you just can't put a price tag on.

staticfoo said...

Hmm... That's a tough one for me...

When I was on graveyard, I spent half of my time on break, and most of the rest at an empty table.

Now I'm on break for anywhere between 1/3 of the time (on slow days) and 1/8 of the time (on a really, really busy day)