Management Toolkit

Is wasted time really wasted?

Ed Frauenheim CNET News

Published: 08 Sep 2005 18:25 BST

...time because they are spending more time at work, but also I believe that there is sort of a sociological change going on where there isn't a bright line between what work time is and what personal time is. It's sort of the combination of people expected to be "on call" nights and weekends for many jobs or be available for many jobs or just having to take work home.

They've got to answer the mobile phone.
Exactly, and then we have mobile phones and BlackBerry [devices] and pagers and email where people are expected to check their email on weekends in many jobs. So work is invading our personal time and therefore it makes sense that personal activities are invading work time. Somehow technology is ahead of the corporate vision of what an appropriate workday is.

In other words, it's giving people tools or letting them do what they want to do?
The workday is changing and the workday is not strictly a 9-to-5 window of opportunity where the employer has access to you and whatever it is you do. The employer is expecting access outside those hours for work purposes. And as a result of that, the things that you would be doing outside those work hours, things like paying your bills, sometimes find their way into the 9-to-5 window. So technology makes it possible for you to easily pay your bills at the office. And that Saturday afternoon emergency phone call gives you the rationalisation or justification to do it — to say, "Well I'm working now, so I have a little bit of fuzzy time, a little bit of spare time on Monday so I can pay my bills."

In other words, it's just kind of quid pro quo almost in the mind.
Right. And one of the reasons people gave for wasting time is they feel that they're not being paid appropriately for the work they're doing. And so it is sort of quid pro quo, in that an individual employee's ability to increase his or her pay is limited, but their ability to decrease the number of hours they actually work is not as limited.

Your quote in the press release was kind of interesting — about this idea of creative waste. If I'm getting you right, you're saying that this time of loafing, if you're doing it in a way that sparks new ideas for a company, it's actually a good thing for the company overall.
Not all non-productive time that an employee spends is a complete waste. Some of it is creative or constructive waste. By that I mean it's an opportunity for soft learning, if you will. Reading a newspaper, for example. That's clearly a non-productive activity for most jobs. However, the education you gain, the things you learn (are useful), whether you're a reporter or a consultant or an accountant.

So I shouldn't feel bad about surfing The New York Times all the time.
Well certainly, you shouldn't feel bad about surfing The New York Times or reading any news article that could be relevant to what you do and could generate a new story idea for you. That's an example of creative waste.

Is there any evidence that water cooler conversations are increasing in the absolute time people are spending on them or in their quality? Maybe the fact that people don't interact with colleagues as much makes those water cooler conversations more crucial.
Bingo. I don't have any kind of study to prove this point, but human beings are clearly social animals. So much of at least office workers' time is spent sitting at a desk in front of a computer doing something. It's non-interactive, at least not a face-to-face human interaction. I think that people are somewhat starved for those kind of interactions and now seek them out more than 10 or 20 years ago when a lot of your work time was spent interacting directly with a person rather than emailing the person or instant messaging the person.

So, I think that the time at the water cooler or the chatting in the halls may actually be increasing because it's sort of a fundamental human need that has been replaced by technology. Or at least the time spent talking has been replaced by technology. And so we are finding new ways or new reasons, new excuses to talk to each other.