Hang Ten!
January 11, 2010 Office Insight
Surf’s up, ladies & gents. Feel free to take some time to enjoy all that the internet has to offer – at the office! Take it from us, it’s a-ok, according to a study from the University of Melbourne. Published last April, the whitepaper found that people who engage in “workplace internet leisure browsing” are actually 9% more productive than their peers that don’t.
Hold off on the day-long Facebook extravaganza, though. The study measured surf time as “a reasonable limit of less than 20% of their total time in the office” – so over the course of a typical 8-hour workday, about an hour or so. Any more than that and productivity plummets – especially for the 14% of “internet addicted” workers.
The science comes from the recent prevailing wisdom of many productivity experts: your mind needs a break sometimes. Melbourne’s professors likened it to lecture halls – you’re able to concentrate for about 20 minutes before getting bored and/or tired, yet once you get a break (or get dismissed), you’ll be right back to the same energy level as you were at the start.
The research leads us to believe that it’s browsing the internet that causes the spike in productivity: you might be learning how to do tasks faster, or gaining valuable work-related knowledge perhaps, but we’re not so sure. If that’s the case, then what about the worker who goes straight to hamster on a piano?
YouTube addictions aside, we’ve got a hunch that web browsing is just a red herring. Actually, it’s the break to do something other than work for a couple of minutes that does the trick. Remember the Pomodoro technique from our post on productivity apps? It asserts the same sort of thing – 20 minutes on, 5 minutes off works wonders.
What do you think? Do you work better if you’ve got free rein to long-board all over the interwebs, or does it just distract you? What do you do during your breaks that helps you to get more done when you’re working? As always, let us know!
Comments