The Internet is a fantastic tool for getting and sharing information, but is it distracting you at work? Read the original article here: http://www.theofficesuppliessupermarket.com/articles/is-internet-usage-ruining-office-productivity

1. Is Internet Usage Ruining Office Productivity?

2. I recently wrote an article (on another blog) that explained how
by reducing Internet usage in a large office, a company was
able to boost productivity by 20% across the board.
In this case the office was more of a call-centre type affair with
people taking live chat, emails and phone calls in response to
customer queries.

3. In a simple experiment, the Internet was
switched off for a couple of days and the
amount of calls taken, responded to and
successfully dealt with increased by a good
percentage.
It was a simple “A/B” test if you like and from
that we could easily deduce that by not
having Internet access the staff were able to
operate far more efficiently.

4. Many put this down to the distracting nature
of the web. For example, according to a
study on office workers, it can take 25
minutes for the average worker to return to
the task they were working on before they
got interrupted.

5. I decided to test this out myself and I noticed that a task that
normally takes me about an hour and a half (writing this article
for instance) would take at least double the time if someone
called me halfway through.
I noticed that after the call I would then make a cup of tea,
change the music in the office and most annoyingly, close all
the windows I had open with the information for the topic I’m
writing about. Distraction is terrible for a writer!

6. However, as I was researching this article for more backup, I
actually found an article that disagreed with my initial
thoughts. Written in 2009, it had the very bold headline:
Study: surfing the Internet at work boosts productivity
Interesting!

7. It starts off by saying:
“Workers are more productive when they are able to occasionally
do non-work stuff online, researchers at the University of
Melbourne have found. Dr. Brent Coker studied the habits of
300 workers and found that the large majority engaged in
what he calls "Workplace Internet Leisure Browsing" (WILB)—
surfing the Internet for personal reasons. But despite the
common perception that such a behavior is a drain on
employers, Coker says that these employees are able to focus
better when performing tasks for work.”

8. Interesting! Of course, there are other studies
that show the opposite is true but if you put
them all together, it seems that what actually
seems to work is short amounts of web time
enhance performance, longer times actually
reduce performance.

9. A problem then. You see, that original study was in
2009 and a big thing has happened since then,
everyone is now on Facebook.
And the big problem with Facebook is that it’s
addictive. It’s almost impossible to get away from
the pings and dings of the Facebook timeline as
people chat away without you. You just want to
take part!

10. So how does the average office handle this problem? It seems
that the solution is to have time set aside for people to surf the
web, or allow them to self-regulate, but policing this would
probably bring even harder problems to solve.
The solution will probably lie in technology somewhere, but for
now, we’re not sure on an answer!

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