

Work surfers more productive: 20% of your time on Internet = 9% more productive - neuroworld
http://trueslant.com/ryansager/2009/04/03/surf-away-at-work/

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blhack
Grr...I typed out three or four _hilarious_ jokes about humans not being
robots, but none of them worked, here goes:

I can't find the link, but there was an article a while ago about a positive
correlation between mental instability and creativity. The reasoning behind it
was that people who are mentally unstable do not have the same sorts of
inhibitions about "radical" ideas. They'll allow their mind to drift further
away from the norm than what is...the norm.

This, I think, is the reason why it's so hard to come to the solution to a
moderately abstract problem if you're concentrating on trying to come up with
a solution (at least if you're doing it alone...working in groups with a big
ol' whiteboard and some mental lubricant [beer] can help too)...

You need to let your mind wander a bit so that it stops over-analyzing
everything...I don't know what you guys would call it, but whenever I code
something that needs to "guess" a bit (image processing, for example), I code
in a "fudge factor", that is: change this a bit up and down from what you read
and see if it works.

Letting your brain wander off to something unrelated to the task at hand, to
me, is like letting it increase the "fudge factor" on whatever it is you're
working on. You "don't care" as much about your task, so you pay less
attention to making sure that it falls within norms. This helps you come up
with more creative solutions (which are sometimes required).

Is this making ANY sense at all? Probably not :(

What I'm saying is that distracting yourself (by internetting) will help you
find the solution to the problem that you're working on, and increase your
productivity.

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BigZaphod
I'd guess the productivity increase comes from the extra hard work that
results after the sense of guilt for having wasted so much time surfing. :)

~~~
roc
Maybe I'm alone in this, but if I _don't_ take a 'breather' after a code
burst, my quality goes to shit.

And seeing as I find it essentially impossible to turn my brain off from work-
problems while I'm not strictly 'on the clock', I have zero guilt about time I
might spend not doing work 'on the clock'.

Less than zero guilt, really. At several jobs I've felt my clients/employers
didn't _nearly_ appreciate the 'free overtime' they got.

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ShabbyDoo
How much better am I at solving work problems if I have some sense of
perspective? Technical perspective, that is. I'm now reverse engineering a
grammar to monitor the interactions with a legacy system. ANTLR is cool, but I
wouldn't have known about it unless I had spent a lot of time web surfing over
the years. How many people do you work with who have no clue about what's
going on in their profession except for what they're told by their bosses to
work on?

Edit: Learning of any sort provides perspective, but it's the technical
perspective for which I have the most direct evidence of employer value.

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edw519
Extrapolate--> 100% of your time on Internet = 45% more productive. Woo hoo.

~~~
Anon84
Mandatory XKCD reference: <http://xkcd.com/605/>

