Effect of Browsing on Workplace Productivity
We all have been there. A particular reference in the mail, or our colleague asking us about a particular restaurant and we google to see its reviews. Before you know, 10 mins later you are viewing the best vacation clothes for a evening ride in Bali. You suddenly get a sense of what has been happening ( with maybe a bit of guilt regarding your capability of surfing online) and then close all the tabs and get all focused on your work. Before you know, in a couple of hours again, BOOM!
But you maybe asking, what's wrong about it ? For every hour that I put in, a 10 min break is the least I deserve and its completely upto me how I spend that time. Well its definitely true that you are the boss of your routine making and hence your free time, lets see what goes on when you browse within the hourly “work breaks”.
When we browse the internet, though its true our “cheat moment” is only of 10 minutes, what we don't realize is as soon as we turn off the website the same doesn't happen in our brain. Infact long after we switched our attention back to our work, the details regarding whatever we were browsing as well as what we were feeling during the time being stays with us ( in some cases for as long as a hour). That's one of the reasons its not recommended to use your mobile before you sleep as the thought patterns and feelings of excitement or joy ( or the addictive feeling of scrolling endlessly) makes us take more time to fall asleep. Hence once you browse say about your wireless headphones on amazon, even though you closed the tab and are back on your excel sheet, your thoughts would be switching between the different brands rather than using the pivot tab properly( guilty of being an excel geek!).
Now some of you would surely be saying, I am fine with that. Not a machine that my mind can switch properly hence I am ok with the time taken for the switch. But consider this, you wouldn't just browse once a day right. Once you start doing so, every hour you would be googling about latest features of smartphones ( or holiday destinations in my case). Give and take 10 mins for each such session, and 20 mins to switch back to your work properly and approximately 8–9 times in a day you doing so. That amounts to losing approximately 240 mins or 4 hours of productivity. Lets assume I was too strict in my calculation still if you half that even, that's 2 hours of loss in a day of 9 hours of work.
So what can be done ? Give up pleasure of searching all together ? Not at all. However you can restrict yourself to searching only during say lunchbreaks or in the evening sometime post lunch when you are tired of the days work. Sorting time slots to match your productivity is something that should be completely personalized.
Hence the next time you catch yourself drifting off on the 7th google tab searching about what socks best go with your white adidas shoes , ask yourself am I doing this in my allotted time slot ?
