In a survey conducted by the executive staffing service Robert Half International Inc., workers were asked how much time each day they believed they spent doing personal tasks at the office. The mean response was 36 minutes, while executives believed that employees spent 46 minutes.
There is another benefit to setting specific times to allow employees to attend to personal business. Switching from work to personal tasks intermittently eats into productivity in another way, said Dave Crenshaw, a time management expert and author of “The Myth of Multitasking.”
“Whenever you switch your attention from one task to another you incur a switching cost, the recovery time,” he said. “If I’m switching from doing business e-mail to doing personal shopping to fantasy football, pretty soon I’m not getting anything done. The loss of productivity is greater than just the time spent on the (nonwork) activity.”
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