Productivity In The Workplace
As I sit here at work looking at the various websites which is part of my morning ritual I start to think; How productive are people at work who have access to the internet?
One of the sites that I check daily is Facebook and a quick glance at it during the morning shows me at least 5 co-workers have updated their statuses on it.
Granted my main task is the webmaster of the company I work for so I am constantly on the internet but am I being productive? As I write this my green tea steeps and my Commercial Invoices for FedEx are being uploaded to one of my web servers for the morning Customs agents. Our corporate web server is having Internal Server Errors but that is currently being handled by our web host. It seems they might be having some routing issues. I can SSH into the server fine and restart Apache so the web side of the server isn’t FUBAR’d.
Are you productive at work? Are you sitting in front of a computer playing on Facebook, or check out YouTube while you’re supposed to be entering data for your TPS report? I am not saying I don’t get any work done, I’m just noticing more and more employees playing on things like Facebook, or MSN Messenger, or checking their Hotmail while at work. I am sure more and more companies are locking external sites down so that their employees aren’t tempted to stray from their daily tasks but that would make work boring! I think work should be somewhat fun, right?
The funny part - I was just thinking about this exact same thing. My problem is that I sit here at work and I’m not really challenged. It’s rather easy tasks most of the time and I spend my days working on personal projects instead of being a web master who just copies and paste’s data.
The biggest problem is that we are in the process of switching CMS’s and there has been a lot of down time that I’ve spent on Digg.com or Facebook. Now I’m sitting on Facebook and programming flex.
So productivity is not my problem, it’s being productive for my employeer thats the problem.
When I had a desk job, I found that the more work I had that I enjoyed doing, the less I goofed around surfing. But when all of the projects were boring, I’d procrastinate and generally care less.
Before I started working from home, much of my time was spent reading my “daily” blogs, and screwing around on Digg/Facebook/MySpace. While I’m sure it took time away from real work, I have found that once you get into a flow, you can still get everything you need to complete finished, even while surfing the non-essentials.