Those evil blog-reading workers are hurting US productivity!
Workers in the U.S will this year waste the equivalent of 551,000 years reading blogs, a study has suggested.
The research by Advertising Age magazine has calculated that some 35 million workers, about one in four of the U.S labour force, will read blogs and visit blog sites during the year.
On average they will spend 3.5 hours, or 9 per cent, of their working week engaged with them.
Time spent in the office on non-work blogs this year will take up the equivalent of 2.3 million jobs, with blog readers essentially taking a daily 40-minute “blog break”.
[…] It calculated that work time spent reading and posting to blogs this year will consume 2.2 per cent of U.S. labour force hours.
Oh, the humanity …
(via J-Walk)
2.2 percent sounds about right. Makes you wonder how US workers are so darn productive, no? Maybe there’s more to productivity than the modern incarnation of Taylorism conceives.
Well, that number includes a huge number of labor hours for folks who have no (or very limited) access to the Net while at the job — from burger flippers to manual laborers to factory workers, etc.
Now, what would be interesting would be to compare it to time “lost” due to smoking breaks …