Survey: Americans spend 20% of their work time slacking off

by Brad Linder Jul 26th 2007

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

It's not clear how any of those (except perhaps the first) justifies spending time playing online video games or surfing web sites. (Download Squad doesn't count. Reading this blog keeps you informed and is thus vital to your job security, no matter what your job is).

Tags: salary.com, wasting time, WastingTime, work

Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)

Mark said 4:15PM on 7-26-2007

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.

Peter said 4:58PM on 7-26-2007

I'm writing this comment from work while taking a break from my Sudoku. :) But I did just finish replacing a server hard drive.

Jim said 4:58PM on 7-26-2007

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.

Todd said 4:58PM on 7-26-2007

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.

RP said 5:18PM on 7-26-2007

Heck, I often spend 20% of my day at downloadsquad alone! :-)

And the other 80% at slashdot. ;-)

Rob said 5:44PM on 7-26-2007

AMEN RP! Me too.

20 mins of actual work?
Yeah,.. that sounds about right.

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