Geez, I haven't had my email 'ding' for years now - I even have my crackberry's email alert turned off. How connected do you really need to be??? If you have a legit need for 'urgent' alerts/communicatins, pick a different method from your everyday communications. Get a pager, use SMS, or get a second cell phone for 'on call' emergencies. Do something other than let some mindless email from HR bout the new leave policy interrupt your day.

Even worse is when I see guys checking their 'berries on dates. For frick's sake - if she's worth a $200 dinner (or even a $40 one) then she is worth the respect of your attention.

drogers

Gawd, I hate these dumb reports. "[stupid time-wasting activity] is costing the U.S. economy 33.2 bajillion a year!" Aren't these things always discredited crap dreamed up by public relations firms?

Tightlines

I completly disagree with these type of reports.

Anyone who claims that checking my email regularly is hurting my productivity is assuming that I must be able to write code without stopping for 8 hours a day with no breaks.

That's simply not possible, and if I try that, my brain closes up shop in protest. Having a breif distraction every hour or two keeps me sane, and makes my productivity higher, not lower.

Munkii

All the more reason to change that 'ding' to a cash register opening sound.

nicklausdeyring

Wow...imagine how much better our consumer lives would be if we could find a way to turn those eating and sleeping hours into dollars. So, eating, sleeping, email dinging, solitaire...I think a pie chart is in order...

Raydancer

"Technology is turning us all into a bunch of time-wasters..."

Who is to say what another persons time is worth? What people do with their individual time alive is their choice. Maybe to them, it is not a waste at all, but rather fun and worth living for.

"One mans trash is another mans treasure."

I just don't understand how you can calculate what "time" is wasted when time really doesn't even exist, nor is it the same for every individual. We're not all slaves living and working on earth just to earn some "money". We all have the choice to do what we wish with our time on earth.

bradwjensen

And how much does it save employers when workers pay bills or shop online rather than leave the office and queue for ages in a local bank branch or supermarket?

Mind you, as a writer and editor I agree with the idea that dealing with constant distractions makes it hard to concentrate.

billbennettnz

Ridiculous. I would blame longer work hours for all these ills first.

Rhywun

and tell me this? what if an e-mail ding was information on how to increase productivity? they forget that its not just about the checking of e-mail, but the content as well..

and as someone else said, even if it is just a chain letter or a loved one... breaks are needed and proven to increase productivity... some companies and schools are adopting 4 day work weeks because it has made students and workers healthier and more productive as they have an extra off day to take care of themselves... less stress = more productivity..

Fishy80

Of what value is the time people spend coming up with worthless statistics like this? Minimal. Which means that it is likely paid for by a grant from a government or siphoned out of what otherwise would be profits.

I think that I'll spend the next half hour emailing everyone I know about how wasteful writing reports like this must be.

GasGiant

Go ahead, take away my opportunity to check email and web sites of interest during work hours. See how productive I become after that. Yeah, nice try.

AndySavage

Of course it makes people less productive. While I question the data/methodology of the sampling, it doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out that doing things which distract you from your actual job (and not the networking which you would like your job to be), you're losing productivity and costing your employer money...and lifehacker is not helping.

dasverlangen

The article insists more on health implications than on waste of money. I must admit that I struggle against procrastination, which means that I suffer from it at least on a low-level form.

DonDiego

I think the problem of becoming addicted to any form of technology does exist. I have read articles in the past about people who have been tied into online games to such an extent that they forget to eat or even to go to the toilet.
When I see people arriving from far away after spending hundreds of dollars of travel expenses to join for instance a conference to then open up their laptop right after they arrived or whatever else gadget to check their e-mail instead of participating in the meeting I believe there is some truth behind those studies.
If you add up all these little non-value-add time slots caused by interruptions after jumping on the next e-mail or instant message like a Pavlov's dog and the time later on to recover from the interruption and try to focus again on what you had been working on before you might end up with a huge amount of wasted time and productivity loss.
Defining time slots in your schedule when to check e-mails is seen as a useful approach to overcome this problem. It doesn't work for instant message though unless you simply turn off that IM client.
I was sitting in a meeting just yesterday when someone in front of me was twiddling with his thinkpad to get connected to the wireless network. "It works", he rejoiced after a while, and then right away received an instant message on his screen. "In the moment you are connected you start receiving those messages", he remarked, and I couldn't figure out whether he now was happy about it or not. If he didn't like to receive those messages, why did he attempt to connect to the network anyway during the meeting ? I believe such behavior is a true symptom of addiction. He certainly missed part of the presentation given during that meeting. And he probably was less effective in responding to that message since the presentation might have been disturbing for him.
Modern technology makes us doing too much in parallel. Thus we do more things, but with lower quality, that's my true opinion.
Wow, long comment! Longer than the posting I have been commenting to.

axel_magard

Hi, it's me again. To emphasize my point regarding how bad multi-tasking actually is I have published an article in my blog about an article I have read in a German science magazine in May this year around that subject: "The myth about multi-tasking".

axel_magard

"Just in, new research discovers that more than $29 Trillion per annum worldwide is wasted on unnecessary research reports."

Storkme

New postings on the Lifehacker blog every 5 minutes doesn't help either...

DWalk

If my calculations are right, with my time being worth 15.3 million dollars an hour to myself and my company, the time I just spent writing this comment and doing the calculations cost the economy somewhere on the order of one million dollars.

These "studies" are the actual wastes of time and resources. Who gives people like this money when there are things like cancer to research...

wykell

Bah, people would find something else to be distracted by if it wasn't email. These things are ridiculous.

kelaar