I’m MORE Productive When I’m NOT
Our friends down under at the University of Melbourne completed a study showing that surfing the net at work for pleasure actually increases the employee concentration levels and helps make a more productive workforce.
According to the study of 300 workers, 70% of people who use the Internet at work engage in Workplace Internet Leisure Browsing (WILB). Among the most popular WILB activities are searching for information about products, reading online news sites. Playing online games was the fifth most popular, while watching YouTube movies was seventh.
In today’s world, I can’t understand how “searching for information about products” is considered not work related, unless of course the study talks about products that are not related to work. In this case, I would categorize this action as “surfing”. But then, the reports adds that “People who do surf the Internet for fun at work – within a reasonable limit of less than 20% of their total time in the office – are more productive by about 9% than those who don’t”.
To me, it makes a lot of sense. I’m more productive and have the time to “clean” my mind, not to mention the expsure to related technologies.
Assaf might want to comment on the following statement:
“Firms spend millions on software to block their employees from watching videos on YouTube, using social networking sites like Facebook or shopping online under the pretense that it costs millions in lost productivity, however that’s not always the case.”