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The art of wasting time in office

Remember one thing. The world does not owe you a living. Far too many of us believe that it does and that is where we go wrong. We stand around, waiting to be served and then when there is no service, we squeal in protest against the unfairness of it all. Then we carry the grudge into our workplace and spend much of our energy getting even with the system rather than making things work for ourselves. Finally, one day, it catches up with us and we are dumped and we cannot understand why.
That 'we asked for it' does not sit well with us.
We are only happy when we are miserable: we loathe our colleagues, we dislike our bosses, we have no loyalty to the company and are constantly complaining in what makes for a massive loss of energy. If this energy was channeled positively, we'd be so much more productive. Let's take it from the management side for a change.
You get a salary for 30 days for working six days a week, and eight hours a day. That's a 48-hour week, give or take. So, let's take a day in the office. Here is a breakdown of the way it goes.
Fact. Ladies spend at least 70 minutes of the eight hours in the powder room. Men take half that time but make up for it by loitering in corridors and having a quick talk.
Smokers spend as much as 90 minutes avoiding the work desk. As no-smoking zones increase, escape from the workload also rises. Going out for a drag - even if it means taking a slow elevator down 30 floors - is seen as an acceptable activity. By the same token, coffee is probably responsible for massacring more minutes than anything else. Coffee breaks and tea services account for the better part of an hour.
About 45 minutes per person are lost making mobile phone calls to people who have nothing to do with your work - like friends, relatives and sundry other folks. This includes texting. WhatsApp ranks right up there with coffee.
If you have internet access at work, you can exhaust the better part of an hour on the social network, chatting or catching up with news in your native language websites. If you are adept enough and know how to keep the Excel sheet or something equally technical ready for camouflage, you can keep other sites open right through the working day and quickly cover up the open site as boss approaches.
Surveys show that gossip about the office exhausts another 30 minutes of a workday and 'flitting' (moving from desk to desk, cubicle to cubicle) can chew up several more minutes. Facebook probably competes closely with actual work in more liberal offices. And if you are still behind the clock, there is lunch. The hour has a nice elastic quality about it and can easily stretch to 80 minutes, even more.
Preparing to get down to work after arrival and preparing to leave after the day are art forms in killing time as another half an hour can be swept away in this preparation. A survey done in 2013 indicated that as many as 27 per cent of office-goers waste maximum time from 3pm to 5pm.
Add late arrival, dental appointments, headaches, cold, 'have to leave early today' permissions and you shave off as much as six hours a week in this practised dilly-dallying. And if you're smart, you can have visitors who will eat into your work time.
There is also your own assorted selection of 'force majeure' situations over which you supposedly have no real control. Like traffic jams, lack of parking space (sorry, I am late, I went around for 40 minutes) and car trouble.
Salary.com interviewed hundred of employees and came up with this data: 64% survey respondents admitted wasting time at work on a daily basis. Time wasted ranged from 30 minutes to several hours each day. Top time-wasting activities were: 43% talking with co-workers, 34% online activities and 4% each on texting and personal calls. The most significant reasons given by workers for why they waste time were: 35% were not challenged enough, 32% felt that there was no incentive to work harder, 30% got no satisfaction from what they do, and 23% were just downright bored.
Do the math and you'll see how efficiently you can be inefficient. Include non-productive meetings and you're knocking off more than half the day not doing your work.
Imagine for a brief moment if your salary was paid on a similar grid and cut according to equally self-indulgent reasons. How would you feel about that?
wknd@khaleejtimes.com