There’s a new study out that shows that browsing the internet while at work may actually help performance. This will probably come as news to employers who’ve spent a ton of money investing in methods to block the internet or inappropriate sites from their office staff. All that money spent making their employees less efficient.
Here’s what’s going on. We always think of browsing the internet as a distraction, and we know the work day is filled with distractions already. So we want to eliminate distractions, right? Well, probably yes to the distractions part. We’d all love to eliminate those annoying distractions that bug us during the day – random emails about the parking situation, phone calls trying to sell us something, requests for updates to that spreadsheet you’d be able to update if you didn’t have to stop updating it to respond the email about updating the spreadsheet … Those are distractions and annoyances because they’re out of our control, and for the most part offices rather than eliminating them contribute to them.
But what the study discovered is that browsing the web isn’t a distraction. It’s a break. When we surf the web, we visit sites that we enjoy visiting. Turns out this is actually pleasurable, which is probably why we do it. And that means it gives us a break from the daily turmoil and makes a more productive when we go back to our assigned tasks. And web surfing has an advantage over other types of break. Since we don’t have to leave our desks, we can take a web break for 2 or 3 minutes to reset our minds and get back to the task. Now, going for a walk in the park might be better, but let’s be realistic, most of us don’t have time to go for a walk during the work day. Someone still wants that spreadsheet updated.