There’s an entire cottage industry based around hating Mondays (Garfield comics, the Boomtown Rats song “I Don’t Like Mondays”) and loving Fridays (TGIFriday’s, anyone?). But according to a new study, the most stressful time of the entire workweek is … Tuesday at 11:45 AM. What?
According to the study, which was conducted in the UK:
Most workers coast through Monday getting their brain in gear and catching up with gossip from the weekend through social networking sites.
But on Tuesday reality sets in and staff spend the first part of the day going through emails they ignored on Monday before planning the week ahead.
I can kind of buy this logic, except that I spent time checking Facebook and blogs pretty much every day of the week and not just Monday. I’d be curious to see some data on what times of the week people are most likely to schedule insanely dull marathon meetings, since that was what always caused me the most stress.
Finally, some good news - all that doodling you’ve been doing in meetings is actually beneficial. The little swirls and flowers and stick figures of your boss with knives all over his body “thought to focus the mind and stop daydreaming, allowing people to persevere with dull tasks,” according to The Daily Mail.
A recent study asked 40 men and women to listen to a long, tedious phone message listing details for a party. When quizzed later on the contents of the message, people who had doodled during the phone call were more likely to remember the names of guests, locations, and other critical details.
If you’d like to print this out and casually slip it to your boss the next time she tries to look over your shoulder and see those “notes” you’re taking during the meeting, you have my blessing.
It’s comforting for those of us who got laid off recently to know that people who still have jobs are doing the same thing we are - slacking off on the internet all day. AOL recently did a survey of salaried employees asking what they waste their time doing the most - number one, predictably, was screwing around online, followed by socializing with coworkers, conducting personal business, running errands, and my favorite: “spacing out.”
Here are some additional ridiculous facts from the press release salary.com sent out about the survey:
- The “slackest” industry is insurance
- The five slackest states (in order) are Missouri, Indiana, Kentucky, Wisconsin, and Nevada
- The top two reasons for why people waste time at work are “I don’t have enough work to do” and “I’m underpaid for the work I do.”
- While a survey of managers indicated that they think women slack off more, the study found that men and women slack the same. In related news, your manager is probably sexist.
- The older you are, the less time you waste at work. I want to make an “old people don’t know how to use the internet and therefore they can’t waste time on it” joke, but I’ll refrain.
New Favorite Thing Alert: I’m totally obsessed with the Procrastionation Flowchart I found on this site. That reminds me, why am I wasting valuable time blogging when I could be slacking off even more? Gotta go.
The term “lame duck” is normally applied to an elected official (like, say, President Bush) who is serving out the end of his or her term. Basically, a lame duck is just waiting out the clock until someone new comes in to take over. If you have just quit your job, the company is interviewing your replacement, and you’re starting to scale back on your tasks, you are a lame duck. Try verbing it.
FRIEND ON IM: So what are you doing right now?
YOU: Checking eBay to see if anyone bid on my office furniture. Flirting with hot guys on jDate.
FRIEND ON IM: Wow, that sounds relaxing.
YOU: Yeah, it’s great. I’m totally lameducking.
Note: You don’t have to quit in order to lameduck. Lameducking often occurs the day before leaving for vacation, the day before a holiday, or right before a promotion kicks in.
I know it’s a Friday and you’ve already checked your email 10 times in hope of something to distract you from actual work, so the news that workers spend a quarter of their office time slacking off isn’t terribly surprising for you. A “network security consultant firm” called Voco reports that workers spend about 25 percent of their time at the office doing non-work-related tasks. That includes everything from browsing eBay to obsessively refreshing Facebook to using online dating sites. They blame “tech-savvy” employees in particular for abusing privileges, although I’m pretty sure their definition of “tech-savvy” means “knows how to use the innertubes thing the kids keep talking about these days.”
Here is the best part of the entire writeup:
Continue reading ’shocking news: employees slack off a lot’