All too easy to waste our time at work

Ground Floor:I met a friend for lunch recently. We talked a little about the dollar and a bit more about the convenience of the internet for Christmas shopping, and then went our separate ways. I realised, as I glanced at my watch, that we were both slackers. The lunch had taken 45 minutes.

Last month, this newspaper was one of many to reveal that the average lunch hour for an Irish worker is now a mere 38 minutes. This is a far cry from the hour-long lunch break that was the norm 10 or 20 years ago and a total change from the pre-Big Bang days when financial sector long lunches were not only acceptable but almost mandatory.

People's reasons for their shortened lunch periods were that they'd "rather work than eat" and that their boss didn't go to lunch so they didn't think they should either.

Once again the nirvanic picture of a future in which the shackles of work would be broken by the advantages of technology seems further away than ever! The unending raft of information that surrounds us means we spend more time at our desks scrolling through e-mails and answering calls from people who - 20 years ago - wouldn't have been able to contact us because they were at a meeting and it was too difficult to find a phone.

And so our working lives, instead of being less stressful, are even busier and more productive.

However, while the Eurest report shows that we are spending more time at our desks, a different report, published last year by America Online and Salary.com, suggests that, although we are sitting at the desk, we're not actually working. We're wasting time - 2.09 hours per day - on a variety of things that have nothing to do with the job we've been employed to do.

The biggest time waster is, unsurprisingly, personal internet use. A whopping 44 per cent of people admitted that surfing the net distracted them from the job in hand.

It's easily done. You decide to do a bit of work on the French tourist industry, you look for information on hotels in Paris and the next thing you know you've clicked on a story about Paris Hilton and - despite thinking that the woman should be banished to a far-flung corner of the earth and never heard from again - you can't help reading it and then clicking on the next story that has something to do with a row she's had with someone you've never heard of. Before you know it, half an hour of your time-wasting allocation has just been used.

Employers expect employees to waste a certain amount of time and take this into account when they're looking at workflow and staffing requirements. However, the America Online Salary.com survey says employers reckoned their employees wasted 1.6 hours a day, not 2.09.

One of the other things that causes employees to turn away from their work is socialising with their colleagues - an activity that came second to surfing the net. After that, people spent time conducting personal business, making phone calls, doing their make-up and just "spacing out". They also spent time applying for other jobs.

This might be because the employees felt that part of the reason they wasted time was because they didn't have enough work to do. Almost a third thought they could actually be busier, so using 2.09 hours to do other things was perfectly acceptable. Nearly a quarter spent time socialising or racing each other up the stairs because they didn't feel they were paid enough for what they were doing.

Getting the raw end of the stick (again!) were female workers. Most employers felt that women wasted more time than men but the actual amount of time they wasted was found to be the same. (This could be down to the fact that women can read about Paris Hilton and work out the return on the long bond at the same time.)

But confirming what most people believe yet what many companies seem unable to accept, older people wasted significantly less time at work than their younger colleagues. Anyone born after 1980 admitted to wasting 1.95 hours; those born in the 1960s wasted 1.19 hours; and people born in the 1940s wasted just half an hour each day.

If you work in the insurance industry you're more likely to spend your time surfing the net, socialising with colleagues or staring out of the window than anyone else; marginally more time, anyhow, than your colleagues in the public sector. Insurance industry people waste 2.5 hours a day. Public sector workers - excluding teachers - waste 2.4 hours.

Meanwhile, those techno-geeks in the software and internet industries (who are responsible for providing some of those time-wasting tools) themselves spend 2.2 hours a day doing nothing very much. My friends in the finance and banking industries waste a mere 1.8 hours a day (though since staring blankly at a computer screen is cited as one of the ways in which people waste time and since a lot of people in the finance industry spend a large proportion of the day staring blankly at screens, I'm not sure how valid this statistic actually is!)

Maybe those who predicted years ago that we would all be working less in the future were actually right. Sitting at your desk with a baguette and a cup of coffee for 38 minutes looks impressive. But does the boss know that you're spending the time organising competitive stair racing with your colleagues on the fifth floor?

[  www.sheilaoflanagan.net ]