The benefits of wasting time

Hearing Voices

By Greg Adams, Auckland | Thursday, 08 September 2011
You get to work, grab a coffee, sit at your desk and scan through your calendar for the day. You may even do some work for a short time. But, as sure as book follows face, you don’t hold out. Before long you’re checking your Twitter feed, updating Facebook, adding a connection on LinkedIn, checking the weather, watching the latest bids on TradeMe, and generally goofing around online.

There’s a word for this sort of thing – cyberloafing. Although it sounds like it should have something to do with making virtual bread, you haven’t inadvertently strayed onto e-Master Chef. In actual fact, far from feeling guilty about this all too common behaviour, we should be celebrating it, if new research conducted by the National University of Singapore is anything to go by.

According to the aptly-named study “Impact of Cyberloafing on Psychological Engagement”, browsing the internet can refresh our tired minds and enhance our productivity, compared to other workplace activities, such emailing, texting, and making personal telephone calls.

There were two studies done. In the first, 96 undergraduate management students were divided into three groups – a control group, a ‘rest-break’ group, and a web-surfing group. All of them spent 20 minutes highlighting as many letter e’s as they could find in a sample text. For the next 10 minutes, the control group was assigned another simple task; members of the rest-break group could do whatever they wanted (except surf the internet); and the third group could browse the internet. Then, they all spent another 10 minutes highlighting more letters.

The results revealed that the surfers were significantly more effective and productive at the tasks than those in the other two groups. They also reported higher levels of engagement, as well as lower levels of mental exhaustion and boredom.

“Browsing the internet serves an important restorative function,” claim the authors. Personal emailing, by contrast, was particularly distracting for workers. Incidentally, the second study surveyed 191 adults and found similar results.

So, how come surfing the web is more beneficial to our performance than, say, chatting to a mate on the phone or texting the wife? Well, it seems to come down to the fun we get from doing it. We usually choose to visit only the sites that we like – which is pleasurable and rejuvenating. By contrast, we can’t control the kinds of email we receive, and reading and replying to them is more demanding and stressful.

The study concludes employers should not overly restrict employees’ access to fun stuff on the internet and recommends managers condone personal web browsing, albeit in a limited way.

The next time you find yourself mentally exhausted at work, take a few moments off to surf – just not for too long. And if you do get caught by your boss adding the weekend’s party photos to your Facebook page, just tell them you are simply adding to your productivity level.

Now, I’m off to watch some inane YouTube videos, ‘cos I’m sure that counts.