By Staff
Americans waste 2.1 hours each working day - not counting lunch breaks.
So much for the Internet making us more efficient.
Surfing the Web is the single biggest thing employees do to squander job time, finds a study by the compensation firm Salary.com.
Web surfing was followed by chatting with co-workers and conducting personal business, from banking to checking on a desired item in an eBay auction.
Lost time of such magnitude means a waste in annual salaries calculated at $759 billion.
Age makes a difference. The older a person, the less time he or she wastes. A person born between 1930 and 1949 fritters away, on average, a half hour, a person born between 1950 and 1959, .68 hour, compared to almost two hours for young employees born in the early 1980s.
Human resources managers may suspect otherwise, but the study found that there is equality between men and women in wasting time.
The insurance industry wasted the most time (2.5 hours per day), trailed by the public sector (2.4 hours), research and development (2.3 hours) and education (2.2 hours).
Finance and banking workers were the most frugal at 1.8 hours.
The study, with more than 10,000 participants, determined that our neighbor, Indiana, with a little less loafing, might have claimed the title No. 1 time-wasting state, at a whopping 2.8 hours per day, but the worst was … Missouri?
How did St. Joseph County (South Bend) then achieve the country's best unemployment rate (4.5 percent in May, compared to a national jobless rate of 5.1 percent).
Apparently these days the "The Show Me State" involves Googling everything in sight. Or maybe Midwest slackers were just more forthcoming with their answers.
One other thing. You're not reading this at the office are you?