Listen, if you have work to do, don't read this column. In this seriously scary economy, when our bitten-down fingernails are holding on to our jobs by rapidly fraying threads, you don't want to waste time at work.
Or maybe you do. According to a recent survey from salary.com, a "record number of people" are spending time "on activities that aren't necessarily work related."
This is the fourth annual Wasting Time at Work survey from the website, so you know they aren't wasting time. They're busy 24/7/365, snooping around the workplaces of 2,500 employees "at all job levels."
If you're a productivity person, the results are chilling. A full 73 percent of the survey participants cop to wasting a part of their day, and 22 percent admit to wasting up to two hours per day. Because no one with a brain, as well as a paycheck, likes to admit that they are any degree less than totally essential, I would multiply these responses by a factor of at least three -- meaning that 66 percent of all workers are wasting up to six hours a day. That doesn't count the two hours a day we spend complaining about how overworked we are.
Interestingly, the biggest time wasters are workers who have a bachelor's degree or higher. Makes sense to me. What's the point of getting an MBA from Harvard if you can't spend eight hours a day playing Scrabilicious?
Employees over 50 claim to waste the least amount of time -- 49 percent report a half-hour or less. Apparently, they don't consider the six trips to the bathroom per hour demanded by their weak bladders as a time sink. Neither do they calculate the time it takes their addled brains to find their way back to their desks when they're done.
The survey also delves into the question of what you do when you don't do nothing. The No. 1 time-wasting activity, at 48 percent, is our friend the Internet. But I'm not sure it's that simple. After all, who among us can really focus on making sales calls when we have no recent, up-to-the-nanosecond information on Jessica Simpson's weight-loss issues? Besides, if they bought us better computers, we wouldn't need to waste so much time hacking through the security firewall to download porn to the company server.
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