Is wasted time really wasted?

ANALYSIS , that women tend to come to and leave the workforce for various issues related to family and kids — either having them or going off and taking care of them. And I think that mothers tend to be more linked to childcare and family care than fathers. And so I think human resource people just apply that to the women in the workforce.

Personal Web surfing was the top time wasting activity. Do you guys see that that may have been somewhat biased by the fact that this is a Web-based survey?
Yes.

That tends to skew the results toward computer types.
It certainly could influence the results, although at this point in time, the vast majority of people do have Internet access.

These people were not ready to give their names?
We did not ask for names.

Even with that anonymity, you're still surprised by the frankness about time wasting?
Yes, and I think that part of the reason that this got such a good response was that it's an issue that people think about on some sort of regular basis. I think most of us when we are wasting time at work think about whether or not that's appropriate and whether we're wasting more than our co-workers.

We were able to get... I think a little more than 10,000 people to participate in this survey. It means that there are a lot of people that are interested in providing information and then seeing what the result was.

Is that more than you normally get for these kinds of surveys?
Yes. We've done various kinds of surveys. I believe this is one of the larger ones. [But] I don't want to artificially inflate the results or mislead people. Part of the reason [for the large response] is because it's sort of an interesting, perhaps salacious topic, but also we did do the survey in conjunction with AOL. AOL has a fairly active user base, and so that does also help in getting the participation numbers higher than what we would normally see.

I want to ask about the response to the question about personal Internet surfing. You see that as including email and IM-type activities?
Yes. In the actual survey they were categorised together as using the Internet for personal use, including Web surfing, email — personal emailing — and personal IMing.

Had we known how big the response rate was going to be, we would have asked three separate questions. I think that we will be doing a follow-up survey or at least redoing this survey next year to update it, and I think that we will break it out a little bit differently to try and capture the differences in those sub-activities.

You found that the average amount of time wasted is 2.09 hours a day, about twice what managers expect from workers. What do you think some of the reasons for this gap are? Could this relate to some kind of human limit to what people can productively give in a job?
That would be the first part of my answer. The workday or work week has extended in the past several decades for the American worker. I mean, it's somewhat ironic that we're talking about time wasted at work at the same time Americans are talking about how overworked they are.

So certainly, people are wasting more...

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