Great - my company has blocked vgchartz.com

[NJ5]

Words Of Wisdom said:

NJ5 said:

That's not where I was going with the question. My point is that people's productivity varies from day to day, people aren't always fully productive. In their less productive moments they can be clearing their mind for a period of time while reading forums (or daydreaming, or whatever clears their mind), or they can be less happy because some manager decided to control them.

Of course I might be biased due to my background as a software engineer. Working permanently all day is not the best way to work, sometimes you just need to freshen up your mind by looking away from the code or design you're producing. This often results in better productivity when you get back to work. There are also periods where you simply have to wait for the computer to finish calculating something, and it's not enough time to take up another task so the best thing to do is to go check your email, or some news or whatever.

In this case I believe trying to control employees by blocking stuff they like to read is counter-productive and will result in bad will. I realize it may be different for other kinds of jobs.

You don't need 20 minutes of forum surfing every other hour to "clear your mind" IMO.  Most of it is just people trying to rationalize their desire to not work which in turn originates from people not enjoying what they do--a much larger problem.

As for software developers and engineers, there is a huge amount of laziness in that field.  There's a tendency for them to start tasks that will take a long time and rationalize that they're just watching the screen so they may as well just do frivilous things when they could be working on other projects or furthering company goals in some other way.  It's like because the computer is active in one manner that their brain turns off and they suddenly forget how to multitask or *gasp* do something that doesn't require a computer.

If you want to not work the full amount of time your company pays you for and effectively get paid for time you're not working then more power to you.  You should understand that if your company finds out or decides that it's unacceptible that they will take required actions to get you back on task.

Where did those numbers come from? I didn't mention any specific numbers of required off-time... sometimes you can work for hours without end, but not every day. People are not robots, and acting as if they are will burn them out (which is something that often happens in the software industry).

There's a huge amount of laziness in every field I'd say. But it's also true that sometimes the little bits of available time you have when you're waiting for something to build are not enough to get into another task. It's simply not feasible to be 100% busy all the time. Often I find that when debugging code, it pays to stop working for a little bit, and sometimes the answer just pops into your head when you're more relaxed (subconscious thinking or something like that possibly).

Regarding your last paragraph, that varies among companies. In many companies work is more task-oriented than time-oriented, even if people's contracts say otherwise.