9. Search

10 Ways Employees Waste Time Online

0.19 hr/week

Although Google has more users than any other website, the amount of time spent searching is relatively low. That fact remains true during work hours, where the time spent searching is also relatively low compared to other more popular online activities. Still, the amount of money lost to time spent on personal searches is estimated by sources to be significant. According to a study by RescueTime, when Google replaced its home page logo with Pac-Man – the playable version of the classic game – earlier this year, it cost the economy a total of 4,819,352 hours of productivity, which researchers estimated was worth over $120 billion in potential productivity.

(AP Photo/Mark Lennihan, file)

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How Employees Wa... 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.

24/7 Wall St. took the total amount of time that workers with PCs spend online in the office while involved in personal pursuits and broke the number down into the top ten "time wasters." They used data from survey organizations such as Nielsen, Pew and Harris, and companies that develop software to monitor use of the Internet, such as Pandora’s The Office Software (theOS), to calculate the hours per week spent on non-work activities.

Read on to see where employees are wasting the most time.

(iStock Photo)
10. Online Shopp... 0.15 hr/week Online shopping, while not everyone’s vice, can drain workers’ productivity. Sites such as Amazon and Ebay are extremely popular, and often take priority at work. This is even more evident around the holiday season. In 2009, IT information association ISACA estimated that the average employee would spend 14.4 hours shopping from the office around the holidays.
9. Search 0.19 hr/week

Although Google has more users than any other website, the amount of time spent searching is relatively low. That fact remains true during work hours, where the time spent searching is also relatively low compared to other more popular online activities. Still, the amount of money lost to time spent on personal searches is estimated by sources to be significant. According to a study by RescueTime, when Google replaced its home page logo with Pac-Man – the playable version of the classic game – earlier this year, it cost the economy a total of 4,819,352 hours of productivity, which researchers estimated was worth over $120 billion in potential productivity.

(AP Photo/Mark Lennihan, file)
8. Videos and Mo... 0.21 hr/week

Online interest in videos and movies is growing, with the number of U.S. videos streamed reaching nearly 10 billion in August. A significant portion of those views are attributable to Google’s YouTube, the 3rd most visited site on the Web. According to comScore, more than 161 million people watched an average of 157 videos in August. The average online viewer watched 9.7 hours during that time. The average duration of videos was 3.7 minutes.

(AP Photo/Cameron Bloch)
7. Pornography 0.13 hr/week

Although it is shocking, a 2010 Nielsen study found that 29 percent of workers have looked at pornography while at work. That number, which amounts to 21 million Americans, suggests that more people are spending time looking at “adult content” while at work than they are reading about current events. In support of these extreme numbers, the study found that 70% of all pornography traffic occurs between 9am and 5pm. What is the average amount of time each of these workers spends on adult websites per session? 12 minutes and 38 seconds.

(iStock Photo)
6. Fantasy Footb... – 0.12 hr/week (during season)

Fantasy football has quickly become a national obsession, and during football season there is almost nothing employers can do to keep participants’ attention from it. The hobby, which requires at least an hour’s worth of attention every week, undoubtedly adds a certain amount of drag to many businesses. According to some reports, fantasy football caused $9 billion in lost productivity in 2009 alone.

(AP Photo/Al Behrman)
5. Instant Messa... 0.22 hr/week

Instant Messaging is another activity that has likely decreased in popularity as a result of social networking. Sites that combine communication with other services naturally do better, even though simple messaging maintains some workers’ interest. Another reason for the decrease may be the ubiquity of texting via cell phones.
4. Portals 0.24 hr/week

Portals, which constitute 4.4 percent of users’ online time, underwent a double-digit decline in time share from one year ago. Still, they are the fourth most heavily used online resource. This means that people still rely heavily on sites such as AOL, Yahoo!, and MSNBC as their gateway to the Web. Given that so many people use e-mail accounts provided by one of these providers, it suggests that this number has at least one reason to remain somewhat constant.

(AP Photo/Paul Sakuma)
3. E-mail 0.45 hr/week

Once the primary means of online communication, e-mail has become less popular, dropping from 11.5 percent of what people do online to 8.3 percent in the past year. Social networking, once again, has begun to show its face, becoming a more popular way to keep in touch for many people. Of course, given how much American business relies on e-mail communication, dropping a personal e-mail during working hours will never go completely out of style.

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2. Online Games 0.56 hr/wee

The popularity of online games has increased and is now only second to social networking. Employees visit gaming sites to play basic arcade games, online poker and Scrabble. However, part of the popularity of online games may be due to the growing usage of social networks. Zynga, one of the most popular online game companies, owes much of its success to the fact that its games, including the huge hit Farmville, are promoted through Facebook. According to the game’s Facebook page, Farmville has more than 62 million active users.

(AP Photo/Brett Flashnick)
1. Social Networ... 1.24 hr/week

Social networking has come to dominate Internet use. Facebook alone has more than 500 million unique visitors per month, representing 85% of all social media use. According to the company’s site, users spend more than 700 billion minutes per month on Facebook. One would assume that some of those minutes have to be from work. Nucleus Research, an IT research firm, found that 77% of employees who have access to Facebook from work check it at least once a day. Of course, other large and fast-growing social media sites such as Twitter also contribute to the loss in productivity.

(AP Photo/Facebook)
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