Survey: Americans spend 20% of their work time slacking off
Salary.com put out a study saying that most of you don't deserve the salary you're being paid. OK, that's not what it says, but it does suggest that the average worker wastes 1.7 hours out of an 8.5 hour day. What qualifies as waste? Chatting with coworkers, doing personal business during work hours, and oh yeah, personal internet surfing tops the list with 34 percent of survey respondents saying they spend time online performing activities that have nothing to do with their jobs.
Our favorite stats from the survey are the list of reasons people gave for slacking off:
- 18 percent said they were bored and/or had nothing to do
- 13.9 percent said their work hours were too long
- 11.8 percent said they were underpaid
- 11.1 percent said their work wasn't challenging enough












Comments
6
Subscribe to commentsMarkJul 26th 2007 4:15PM
Man I am way above that. According to Google Reader Trends I read around 1500 posts a day between 8-5 week days. To quote Office Space I probably do about 20 minutes of work a day.
PeterJul 26th 2007 4:58PM
I'm writing this comment from work while taking a break from my Sudoku. :) But I did just finish replacing a server hard drive.
JimJul 26th 2007 4:58PM
What about those reports that the U.S. has the highest productivity and least number of vacation days in the world? For all that productivity and little relaxation, I wouldn't put it past anyone. Just take this article with a grain of salt and don't call me in the morning.
ToddJul 26th 2007 4:58PM
0.000001 percent ( me ) say that they see their executive team using the most expensive, highest performing desktop and laptop computers ( read: Dell XPS and Sony Vio loaded to the max with all the extras ) just to read email and monkey PowerPoint - making concerns about the cost of surfing at work moot.
First class air fair for business trips, $400 lunches and greens fees, all at the company's expense, were not factored into the responses.
RPJul 26th 2007 5:18PM
Heck, I often spend 20% of my day at downloadsquad alone! :-)
And the other 80% at slashdot. ;-)
RobJul 26th 2007 5:44PM
AMEN RP! Me too.
20 mins of actual work?
Yeah,.. that sounds about right.