It is broadly assumed that American workers with access to computers spend some portion of their day using them for personal communication, gain, or pleasure. The actual wasted time and productivity turns out to be staggering.
24/7 Wall St. looked at a number of workplace studies about how people spend time online. Most of this research says that workers with PCs are on the Web for 20 to 22 hours a week. About a quarter of that is time spent on personal matters. That is about five hours of lost productivity each week. It is hard to imagine that any other activity before the advent of the PC could have eaten up that amount of time at work, even considering such productivity killers as going to the corner store to buy cigarettes or gossiping with co-workers around the water cooler.
The PC has become a tremendous tool of both efficiency and waste at the same time. It gives workers the unprecedented ability to communicate, record and analyze data. Employees, though, now evade their responsibilities at work thanks to a nearly infinite number of social interaction, entertainment and pornography websites
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