Work Efficiency

Boys and girls gather round for another wacky and wild post. Okay, maybe not wacky and probably not that wild but it is a post and that is what I promised. I've actually been wanting to talk about this for some time but I got busy blogging about poker and poker.

So we all slack off at various times throughout the work day, admit it you do it too. It helps us from going insane from staring at a computer screen all day or putting buttons on Levi's (if you work in a sweat shop). But I have noticed something about this "slack off" time, Californians are way more efficient at not being busy with work. Example, in Oklahoma, there is a person that takes the daily crossword and makes copies of it with the company copier and distributes this crossword to a large group of people. These people spend part of their morning doing this crossword and then work on it throughout the day. I have even heard conversations about what 3-down is, "five letters second one is 'g'". So not only do these people use company time to do the crossword, they also use company resources. Now I have to admit I was part of the group when I first started and had not a lot to do. But this group, you can't get out of it. Its like a gang, without the getting jumped in thing. One day I cleaned my desk and I had about a hundred blank crossword puzzles.

The actual "break room" was co-located with the outdoor smoking lounge, thus whenever I went to get a Coke I saw the smokers outside. Many of which also subscribe to the daily crossword. So now these people are wasting company time by smoking. I'm not trying to be holier than thou, because I have slow days where I waste company time too. I'm merely stating that these people are now up to two non work related activities while at work. And its not as if they have one cancer stick a day, you can set your watch by these people, every hour on the hour. Some even every thirty minutes.

Then (here is where I fall victim to slacking off) there are the talkers. Amazingly enough, a lot of the crossword crew and the smoke section make up the busy bees. So all told you have 5-10 minutes dedicated to smoking, 5-10 on crossword and 10-15 on a conversation. At a minimum we're talking 20 minutes out of an hour of not working, or roughly 2 hours in an 8 hour work day (25%). At a max 35 minutes or 4 hours and 40 minutes a day (58%). These numbers may be too much but it all leads to this...

I get to California and here is how they do it. They have 1, ONE, paper in the smokers area and they as a group smoke and work on the crossword and talk. Yeah, that's right. All three at one time. I have no data on how much time they spend due to the setup here, but I was impressed at their efficiency in not being efficient. The irony, I wasted 15 minutes of work time writing this post, and you just wasted 10 minutes of your company's time reading this. Oh me.