• We’re currently investigating an issue related to the forum theme and styling that is impacting page layout and visual formatting. The problem has been identified, and we are actively working on a resolution. There is no impact to user data or functionality, this is strictly a front-end display issue. We’ll post an update once the fix has been deployed. Thanks for your patience while we get this sorted.

Study: Workers Spend 60% or More of Day Web Surfing for Personal Reasons

I'm usually multi-tasking at work... working in IT, I've got a lot of 30-60 second breaks throughout the day where I'm waiting on a process to finish, rebooting a server, etc and I can only juggle so many work projects simultaneously (whereas spending 30 seconds reading an AT doesn't really require as much focus and attention as trying to work on a fifth ticket)
 
I think I might spend 10 to 20% of my day browsing the web, and that's on slow days. 60% or more should be obvious to an employer.
 
DAGTA said:
I think I might spend 10 to 20% of my day browsing the web, and that's on slow days. 60% or more should be obvious to an employer.
Click to expand...

That depends on how good you are at your job. What if you can be just as productive as other employees in your time?
 
Hell I don't even take "smoke breaks," let alone spend over half of my time fucking off..sometimes I wish I had that much spare time.

Then today I had 20 minutes with nothing to do and was bored.
 
I work in a NOC, basically wait till something happens. I sometimes browse the net but since my screen is visible to everyone I don't spend lot of time doing it. I'm pretty much just staring at all the alarm screens, which is what I'm suppose to do. On night shift or weekend day shift then I usually watch movies or TV or browse the net. As long as I'm looking at the alarms this is permitted. Just frowned upon during business hours because it looks like we don't do nothing.
 
Atomic Playboy said:
SQL queries take time to run dammit. What am I supposed to do, just sit there and watch the progress bar do fuck all?
Click to expand...

Write more efficient queries. 😉

Or, are you a DBA and you're rebuilding indexes and such? In that case, catch up on your inbox.
 
Kelvrick said:
That depends on how good you are at your job. What if you can be just as productive as other employees in your time?
Click to expand...
Kinda like good car mechanics who can the do a job in X hours that the book says can be done in Y hours, and billing you for something in between.

Excessive hard work only begets more hard work 😉
 
Last edited:
Kelvrick said:
That depends on how good you are at your job. What if you can be just as productive as other employees in your time?
Click to expand...

I have my own laptop at work just for fucking around, downloading podcasts, and listening to music. It's a simple fact that fucking around increases productivity:
link
Research from University of Windsor in Canada showed the effect of music on the work performance of software developers. According to the study, without background music the designers’ quality of work was lowest and it took them more time to complete tasks. With background music, participants reported positive mood change and enhanced perception while working. Plus, the researchers noted that this positive change in mood correlated with increased curiosity — an excellent thing to have when doing creative work.
...
The type of music you listen to also matters. In a study published in the Journal of Music Therapy, excitative music tends to increase feelings of vigor and tension, while sedative music eased tension. That may be stating the obvious, but here’s the interesting part: Listening to your favorite type of music, whatever it is, lowers your perception of tension. This means you don’t feel as stressed or tense. But your heart rate, respiration, and blood pressure is higher when listening to excitative music — even if you like it.
Click to expand...

My productivity is far higher when I can listen to upbeat music. Unfortunately, work computers often have really fucked up permissions and they don't allow things of that kind. No internet radio, no youtube playlists, and sometimes computers don't have Windows Media Player installed.

Some companies suck so bad that the company's goal is to lower morale as much as possible. After some talking, I found that both of my parents retired because morale at their jobs became unreasonably low. You couldn't have music, you couldn't fuck around, and they went "stat crazy" about everything. All of the good people either got new jobs or retired.
 
I call shens. "According to the study, workers spend about 60 to 80 percent of their time at work surfing non-work-related websites." Maybe some can waste that much time and still keep their jobs, but I doubt it's the norm as the study implies.
 
Kelvrick said:
That depends on how good you are at your job. What if you can be just as productive as other employees in your time?
Click to expand...

I won't say working at your full potential always equals getting raises and promotions, but working at 20-40% of your capability almost never does.
 
ShawnD1 said:
My productivity is far higher when I can listen to upbeat music. Unfortunately, work computers often have really fucked up permissions and they don't allow things of that kind. No internet radio, no youtube playlists, and sometimes computers don't have Windows Media Player installed.
Click to expand...
This. Thank God for my personal laptop with a crap-ton of FLACs. Drowns out cubicle chatter, gorram overly loud ringtones or notification beeps, phone conversations, and the general screams of the damned, err... coworkers.

Also, nothing kills a day's productivity like scheduling a ton of meetings in the morning. Keep those damned things in the afternoon where they belong after lunch and stop calling meetings in which the sole purpose is to circle-jerk.
 
Last edited:
I have co-workers that take a 5-minute smoke break once per hour. So my logic is that a 5-minute break to browse ATOT once an hour is healthy for my brain. I may spend a little more time on ATOT during a lunch break.
 
Suckers. If I worked 40% of the time I would be promoted to Country President within a week. 5-10% gets me well-above-average raises on a yearly basis.
 
As I do mostly troubleshooting and assist with helpdesk every now and then, if I always have something to do that means I'm doing a crappy job.
 
Bah - you act as if employees wasting time is a new thing. I am a system administrator - my yonger employees surf the internet when they're slacking off. My older ones? They're walking around the office as if we were a social club.
 
Paladin3 said:
I won't say working at your full potential always equals getting raises and promotions, but working at 20-40% of your capability almost never does.
Click to expand...

At my last job, I busted my ass and worked long hours for several years. I got good raises, but no promotions and certainly no raises that would've been as large as a raise that I would've received with a promotion. I then decide I'd had enough so I cut my hours way back and ended up getting the same raises and reviews.

The moral of the story? When you start somewhere, work hard and build a reputation and then you can start slacking. 😀
 
as a dev there is a bit of downtime when recompiling and stuff like rebooting servers and applications. sometimes you get caught on a tangent though and spend more time than you would like.
 
Ryan said:
Bah - you act as if employees wasting time is a new thing. I am a system administrator - my yonger employees surf the internet when they're slacking off. My older ones? They're walking around the office as if we were a social club.
Click to expand...

That's about how it works. I spend more of my day browsing than I should. I get crap from the older employees about it, as 5-6 of them are standing and socializing at someone's cubicle for the last 45 minutes...

As far as I'm concerned, it's only a problem if you're behind on your work. I'm not behind, therefore it's not a problem :biggrin:
 
Ryan said:
Bah - you act as if employees wasting time is a new thing. I am a system administrator - my yonger employees surf the internet when they're slacking off. My older ones? They're walking around the office as if we were a social club.
Click to expand...

Ha I've noticed this too. I'm fucking around on the internet, and the older guys pull up chairs then shoot the shit. Some of the conversations are actually productive. They feel like complaining about some of the work going on, and they share what the problems are. "Guy A at company X is asking me to do this thing again. Does he do this to you guys? He's a good guy but he's definitely not a power guy because what he's asking is expensive and impractical."
 
You must log in or register to reply here.

TRENDING THREADS

Back
Top