Lost Corporate Productivity Due To Goofing Off

For shame. According to this Reuters article, goof off workers are costing employers $544 billion dollars in lost productivity. The biggest time waster: surfing the internet. Other time wasters included socializing with co-workers, running errands, and the good old time wasting standby, spacing out. Thinking back to my days as a corporate goof ball, I recall a litany of time wasters my co-workers performed often:

• Grooming--this included fussing over hair, clipping, painting and/or chewing nails (the toenail chewers were the worst), clothing adjustment, tooth brushing, sinus sucking and scab chewing.
• Meetings--management love to hear themselves gab. They prattle on with hackneyed corporate witticisms which fill volumes of cliche books. Meetings which should last five minutes drag into hours. Talk about lost productivity. Let's not forget those little one-on-one meetings in the manager's office. You know. The one where they gossip about people in the company. Then, they attempt to steer you into making a similar comment which is later shared with the gossiped about person.
• Corporate picnics, golf outings, etc--they think that they're doing you a favor by wasting your personal time by giving you a burnt weenie sandwich and a plate of stale potato chips. The planning and execution of these time wasting events sucks away corporate productivity.
• Photocopying--broken down hulks of garbage which never work. If I had a dime for every time I had to pull out a jammed piece of paper. Also, think about the time it takes to drop your drawers and climb on to these behemoth productivity wasters.
• E-mail--for crying out loud, management needs to learn how to compose e-mails in five sentences or less. I don't want War and Peace sitting in my inbox, Dexter.
• Toilet time--I swear there are people who go to the bathroom and act like it's a camp out or vacation. This is probably the biggest productivity loser of all. Maybe, if they installed computers in the crappers, people could surf the web...hey, that's multi-tasking.

By the way, how much time and productivity gets wasted by CEO's? Of the largest 50 companies, the average CEO earns over 10 million dollars. Think about it. A CEO on the toilet costs a company (and stockholders) big bucks. And then there's those golf outings, meetings, extra long lunches...