The insurance industry is particularly rife with time wasters (can you blame them?) and Missouri, for reasons not entirely clear, is the state with the highest percentage of slackers.
The No. 1 time-wasting activity is surfing the Internet and sending personal e-mails (a finding perhaps skewed by the fact that the survey, conducted by AOL and salary.com, was Web-based), followed by socialising with co-workers, conducting personal business and just plain “spacing out.” All of this loafing is supposedly costing employers $759 billion a year in lost productivity.
The findings were greeted, predictably, with much hand-wringing about the declining American work ethic. I find the survey disturbing too, but for a different reason. American workers, it turns out, are wasting less time than they did just a couple of years ago – 19 per cent less. The dangerous trend needs to be stopped.
The elevation of hard work to the status of noble pursuit is, in the sweep of human history, relatively recent. The ancient Greeks and Romans viewed hard work as a curse. When it comes to interspersing work and frivolity, nobody beats the Thais.
“If a job isn’t “sanuk” – fun – it’s hardly worth doing,” Thai architect Sumet Jumsai told me at his Bangkok office recently. Jumsai is no slouch, though. He’s designed some of Thailand’s landmark buildings –- and, clearly, had fun doing it.
Despite all the frettings, the US isn’t a slacker nation. The UN’s International Labour Organisation recently issued a report that found that the US leads the world in worker productivity – and by a wide margin.
So why does the country feels like such slackers? For one thing, Americans are a nation ambivalent about work. People cherish it and resent it. I suspect that some of this loafing is a subtle form of revenge. With work now sloshing over into personal time, it seems only natural that personal time should slosh back into work. Technology is fast rendering distinctions between “work” and “leisure” meaningless. This is a problem. If the US is to stay strong, we need to goof off more at work, not less.
Goofing off is not a waste of time – well, not always. Exhibit A: Albert Einstein. He was a world-class loafer. In 1905, he was working as a clerk at a Swiss patent office, spending a lot of time spacing out. A “respectable federal ink pisser” is how Einstein described himself. Yet it was at work, daydreaming one day, watching a builder on a nearby rooftop, that he experienced “the happiest thought of my life” – a thought that soon blossomed into his “special theory of relativity.”
Thus the recent Web survey gets to the heart of the paradox. America is a nation of doers, hard workers, yet it is also a nation of ideas, big ideas. These two aspects of the American personality constantly rub against each other; great ideas require idleness, but idleness makes us uncomfortable.
LA Times