A Study On Time Wasted At Work 324
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.'"
Standby Periods (Score:5, Insightful)
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 (Score:5, Funny)
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 (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Standby Periods (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Standby Periods (Score:5, Insightful)
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 (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Standby Periods (Score:5, Interesting)
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 [slashdot.org] are moderated funny, and this [slashdot.org] 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.
Re:Standby Periods (Score:3, Funny)
The proper spelling is buffoon [reference.com].
Have a nice day.
Re:Standby Periods (Score:2)
I wonder if there's ever been a study done on how many "spelling nazis" have typos of their own in their spelling flames of other posters.
Re:Standby Periods (Score:4, Insightful)
And I wonder if there's ever been a study on how many people on Slashdot never get the joke.
Re:Standby Periods (Score:3, Informative)
Slashdot is NOT a waste of time. (Score:2)
I suspect half the trolls are going to make jokes about slashdot being a waste of time.
I wish my previous CFO would spend more time on slashdot, and perhaps we'd have done far fewer stupid things like maintaining an unmaintainable mess of microsoft components and forcing them on our customers.
Slashdot, beyond the way the trolls word things, is a great place to find best-practices for the IT world.
Re:Slashdot is NOT a waste of time. (Score:3, Funny)
Thank you, that's the funniest thing I've read all day.
Re:Standby Periods (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Standby Periods (Score:2)
-Your Boss
Re:Standby Periods (Score:2, Funny)
Effective time-wasting links (Score:3, Interesting)
More puzzles [puzzle.jp]
Computer Stupidities [rinkworks.com] (warning: may provoke laughbursts)
Math articles [cut-the-knot.org]
Quicktime panoramas [panoramas.dk]
The world's most famous debunker [randi.org]
Variously educational, baffling, entertaining, or just pretty.
Re:Effective time-wasting links (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Standby Periods (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Standby Periods (Score:2, Insightful)
Wasted Time and The 40 Hour Week (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Wasted Time and The 40 Hour Week (Score:5, Interesting)
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 [wikipedia.org] 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 [wikipedia.org] 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 [wikipedia.org] of time spent at work.
Paul Lafargue's Right to be Lazy [marxists.org] (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.
Re:Wasted Time and The 40 Hour Week (Score:3, Interesting)
I wo
Re:Standby Periods (Score:2, Informative)
1. Sleeping. Pretty obvious. Just go to the canteen, or some obscure place, and have a good kip. Works best when the machines are down on a night shift when no-one gives a shit. Make sure it's somewhere really obscure so you can't be accidently found. This only works if your job isn't one which is important.
2. Sweeping. Just get a brush, and pretend to be sweeping up. You can stand about with it, and it l
Productivity (Score:2, Funny)
Ha! (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Ha! (Score:2)
In that case, you should spend some of your waste time at work looking up the definition of irony [reference.com].
Re:Ha! (Score:2)
irony
2 a. Incongruity between what might be expected and what actually occurs: "Hyde noted the irony of Ireland's copying the nation she most hated" (Richard Kain).
2b. An occurrence, result, or circumstance notable for such incongruity
Please explain to me how a an article about wasting time at work, posted on Slashdot, is incongruous.
For your benefit:
incongruous:
1 Lacking in harmony; incompatible: a joke that was incongruous with polite conversat
Re:Ha! (Score:4, Funny)
3. Like goldy and bronzey, only made of iron.
Re:Ha! (Score:5, Funny)
Management discussing other people wasting time.
Now that's REAL irony.
You'll never catch me... (Score:5, Funny)
Oh shit, here comes the boss....
+++ATH
NO CARRIER
Re:You'll never catch me... (Score:2)
NO CARRIER
You unplug your internet connection when your boss shows up?
Re:You'll never catch me... (Score:2)
I was just trying to make a funny post anyway. I don't really care what my boss catches me reading... he can't do my job.
How does the old saying go...
Those who can, do.
Those who can't, manage.
I don't need a study to prove this... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:I don't need a study to prove this... (Score:4, Funny)
Re:I don't need a study to prove this... (Score:2)
Re:I don't need a study to prove this... (Score:2)
Time waster (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Time waster (Score:2)
What a nice report (Score:5, Funny)
Re:What a nice report (Score:3, Funny)
(.)(.)
).(
( | )
Seriously dude, even command-line apps will spawn windows or change the video mode in order to display graphics.
Re:What a nice report (Score:3, Interesting)
Sure, it's never been that mythical 1950's world where the white-collar workers left for work at 8:30am and got home before 6:00pm, but we were all brought up believing that. All these companies spent lots of money advertising that living in their future would be hassle free and labour limited..
Re:What a nice report (Score:2)
Survey idea (Score:4, Funny)
* 1hr/week
* 1hr/day
* 2hrs/day
* 3hrs/day
* I don't read slashdot you insensitive clod (then what are you doing selecting this one)
* CowboyNeal
Re:Survey idea (Score:2)
Missing Option: (Score:2)
Re:Survey idea (Score:3, Insightful)
Ha! Not me. (Score:2)
Cheers,
IT
Nooooo! (Score:2)
Initech (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Initech (Score:5, Funny)
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!
Re:Initech (Score:3, Funny)
Peter Gibbons: Well, I wouldn't exactly say I've been *missing* it, Bob.
I wanted to participate in that (Score:2, Funny)
What a waste of study (Score:3, Interesting)
Come on, in this day and age a "scientific" study cannot possibly think it's going to say anything meaningful about wasting time at work if it considers "the internet" as one thing. Clearly, it needs to be subcategorized into meaningful elements. Maybe something like webmailers, on-line magazines, interactive discussion groups, etc. That way the researchers could seperate the waste from the worthy.
I mean, to study people wasting time on the internet is tantamount to studying people wasting time on computers.
ACButt location. (Score:4, Insightful)
Would it save my employer anything for me to be staring at the blank screen instead?
Re:Butt location. (Score:3, Interesting)
"Dr. Dobbs? I don't think so - you're not in the medical profession anyway!"
BTW, that company is not the same as the one listed in my URL.
I'm sick and need help (Score:3, Funny)
Please, someone make me stop. It's taking up all my time. I've started writing songs about it, so when I lose my job and am out on the street I'll have something to sing while I panhandle.
This is a lot harder to kick than nicotene, crack, heroin, alcohol, meth, overeating, bulemia, and necrophilia were.
wow! (Score:2)
Does the article mention what the internet is being used for? Does the article link to the report?
Without the internet and sites like /. (Score:4, Insightful)
And to go a bit further, without forums, reference sites, online howto's, and last-but-not-least the almighty google I'd would be nearly as efficient as I am at work... having a server bork with mysterious driver issues is quite often solved with part inuition/experience and part googling the error messages...
Re:Without the internet and sites like /. (Score:2)
What scares me most about these types of studies is middle management will grab ahold of them, using them as justification for cracking down on ALL internet usage - without considering the consequences.
Already, we've seen the law offices and accounting firms that slap legal "disclaimers" on the end of every outgoing
i have my routine set for when i come to work... (Score:4, Funny)
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.
Re:i have my routine set for when i come to work.. (Score:2)
Re:i have my routine set for when i come to work.. (Score:3, Funny)
Peter: Yeah.
Bob: Great.
Peter: Well, I generally come in at least fifteen minutes late, ah, I use the side door - that way Lumbergh can't see me, heh - after that I sorta space out for an hour.
Bob: Da-uh? Space out?
Peter: Yeah, I just stare at my desk, but it looks like I'm working. I do that for probably another hour after lunch too, I
Increased Leisure Time (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Three quarters of a TRILLION dollars? (Score:2)
Re:Three quarters of a TRILLION dollars? (Score:2)
Um, am I the only one... (Score:5, Funny)
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.
Re:Um, am I the only one... (Score:2)
Re:Um, am I the only one... (Score:2)
Welcome to Firefox/Opera tabs (Score:3, Funny)
the internet and solitaire. (Score:5, Interesting)
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. (Score:5, Insightful)
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. (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
So basically the job could be done in 45 minutes... Why did you ever hire someone you didn't need?
Re:the internet and solitaire. (Score:2)
It's because GP didn't want to do 45 minutes worth of work, duh. :-)
Re:the internet and solitaire. (Score:3, Informative)
As for answering phones, there was an average of 20 phone calls and hour and those involved maybe 4 dispatches per day to work crews.
SOMEONE had to be there to answer the phones, people hang up on answering machines, fact.
And hang ups = lost business.
The real pisser was that she was more interested in playing the games than answering the phones, dispatching or doing the accounting.
When I walked in, she was hypnotized by the st
Re:the internet and solitaire. (Score:5, Insightful)
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?
Re:the internet and solitaire. (Score:2)
If any of my people complained that they could do their work in 45 minutes, I'd find them at least 6 more hours of duties to do. You know, given that we expect them to waste at least one and all.
If I couldn't find them more work to do, I'd probably reconsider why I had them staffed in the first place. If ultimately it was determined that they are neccesary as an on call basis, I'd let them do whatever the want as long as they completed the obligations *I* gave th
Glad for Goofing Off (Score:2)
The sysadmin at my office is almost constantly making life difficult by reconfiguring permissions on directories I'm trying to serve web documents from, or just moving my home directory altogether, or removing my ability to restart my development webserver. It drives me crazy.
I'm glad he wastes an hour or two every day browsing random websites and chatting to his friends on MSN Messenger. It means I can actually get some work done! (Of course, when he's broken something for the nth time it does give me a h
Be careful how... (Score:3, Funny)
My employer encourages to use Internet (Score:2, Interesting)
Have you ever noticed... (Score:2)
My favourite of recent times was having worked 5 weekends in a row or something, I wanted to work from home one day because I was getting a new PC delivered (I had no holiday allowance left). You wouldn't believe the excuses that came out as to why that couldn't happen.
("Well, what if everyone wanted to do that?")
Its not the time invested that counts. (Score:3, Insightful)
Yes it has been commented that I surf a lot. However to have your VP rebut that comment with praise for the quality and consistency of your work does say that some people do get it.
Hell there are people not making calls or surfing that waste more of a companies time just by being there. I cannot tally the number of hours spent doing something someone else supposedly did. I cannot tally the hours spent on some high level persons personal directive that only was tossed at a later date.
Obligatory Bash.org Quote (Score:5, Funny)
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/ [bash.org]
Is It Really Wasted Time? (Score:5, Interesting)
Go figure.
Re:Is It Really Wasted Time? (Score:2)
"The Internet" (Score:3, Insightful)
I use Television, Telephone, Radio, Cell phone, FAX, Newspapers and even the U.S. Postal service. None of these things are thought to be remarkable, ground-breaking or otherwise remarkable media. They aren't new but they are certainly very well integrated into the way we do business.
People are, instead, distracted by the newness and novelty of the applications that use the internet medium. We all know how people think "the web" == "the internet" and how wrong that is. So here again, we're talking about how the internet is changing the way we do business. It is and it isn't. We have a new medium with which we exchange information. In some ways it's superior to existing media and in other ways it's not. As the dust settles, people will use the medium that works best for their use. The Net obsoletes nothing specifically.
100% of my time is wasted at work. (Score:5, Funny)
Are they counting time they waste? (Score:2)
Almost 4 -weeks- lost to a new project management methodology.
Much of it literally just sitting at the desk after secretly finishing the work but not being allowed to check it in to the code bases.
Then there are the documents -- about 8 hours a week on documents put on a hard drive and -never ever- looked at again (except 1% by auditors to confirm we did those useless documents).
I remember what it was like to be productive but I'm so hamstrung by red tape it is hard to get in that mode an
Longer Days (Score:2, Funny)
Re:Longer Days (Score:2)
Added benefit: Superpower Hearing (Score:3, Funny)
Obligatory Office Space Quotes (Score:2)
Peter: I generally come in at least 15 minutes late. I use the side door, that way Lumbergh can't see me. And after that I just sorta space out for about an hour.
Bob: Space out?
Peter: Yeah I just stare at my desk, but it looks like I'm working. I do that for probably another hour after lunch too. I'd say in a given week I probably only do about 15 minutes of real, actual work.
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
Get a chess clock... (Score:4, Interesting)
His days worked out with a 50:50 work-doss ratio!
Baz
This isn't fair. (Score:2, Interesting)
But I'm a support technician. If I'm busy it means stuff is broken and other people can't do their job. And if that's more than 1 person it's probably costing the company more than it costs them to have me sitting around doing nothing. I'm like insurance: got to have it, but using it means you have bigger problems than paying the premiums.
But I still feel
how about another study? (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:And as I read this... (Score:2)
Signed: Robert, your Boss
Re:so ... (Score:2)
You work at Mcdonalds? I knew those WAPs were being used for something
Re:"wasted" (Score:2)
That would be me. I goof off, I've probably spent half the day today on various web sites, but my boss knows he can count on me when he needs me. I've worked hard to earn that trust and I'm going to enjoy it.
Re:This explains it all (Score:4, Insightful)
But then if you look at the "methodology" [salary.com] 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.