Time Wasters

BBC has an interesting article about Facebook causing lost productivity in the office. I'm not sure why they pick on Facebook, as opposed to MySpace or YouTube... The point is, if you have internet access, then there will be those workers who spend too much of their workday online. It's easy to say that I only go online when I'm on break or during my lunch hour, but ten minutes spent online easily turns into 15, then 20, etc.

We had a situation where I work a few years ago where several computers were networked together (but not connected to the internet) for a project that several of us were working on. One of us, who was a 'gamer' brought in a multi-player first person shooter game, so that different people, at different computers, could enter the game on the LAN and play as a team, or against the other player(s). He got permission for us to play during lunch. It didn't take long before people started coming to 'a good stopping place' a few minutes before lunch, and playing the game. Then people wanted to 'finish this level' at the end of lunch, before going back to work. Soon, lunch was taking about three hours. When our supervisor came to realize this, the game was hastily removed from the LAN. One can hardly blame him.

Now, we have no games loaded on out computers (not even solitaire), and, although we have internet access; Facebook, MySpace, YouTube, HoTMaiL, Yahoo Mail, G Mail and a host of other time-wasters are blocked. Again, this is somewhat understandable. There are a number of web-sites out there that claim to 'proxy' (or, essentially, redirect web pages) so that blocked pages can be viewed anyway, but our IT guys seem to find out about these sites quicker than the rest of us, and block them, too. Again, not really surprising. The bosses claim that it isn't so much lost productivity as it is expensive bandwidth: If I'm doing legitimate research on the net, but somebody else is hogging bandwidth by watching YouTube videos, then it takes me much longer to do my job; but if they pay for an internet connection that would allow all of us to watch YouTube videos without affecting anyone else, then that gets expensive.

Quite frankly, although I feel employers have a right to limit what employees can access on company computers and even employees' computers hooked up to the company's network, people were wasting time at work long before there was an internet. As a matter of fact, one of the early internet time-wasters was called watercooler.com, because it was an online version of the old stereotype of employees gathering at the water cooler to chit-chat. The problem with watercooler.com was that employees could 'gather at the water cooler' without leaving their cubicles.