Employers encouraging their employees to take breaks for Facebook, Twitter and YouTube?  Is it possible?

The University of Melbourne sponsored a study by Brent Coker, from their department of management and marketing, claiming that the above listed breaks help sharpen concentration.  The study went so far as to say that people using the Internet for personal reasons were actually 9% more productive.  Coker even gave this an acronym, “WILB” for “Workplace Internet Leisure Browsing.”

When this study was published, I was interviewed by ABC’s San Francisco affiliate, KGO radio.  They wanted my opinion on whether this WILB could be considered as a productivity tool.  You can listen to my on-air response to that.

A premise behind this is that it is good to take breaks and in doing so you are better able to focus for the next activity rather than trudging through the day.  I’m all for breaks after focused work time, but where I see a problem here is that we already have very little focused work time in a day.

Two of the basic scheduling skills in time management training include:

• An uninterrupted block of time to concentrate with minimal distractions, for one- to one-and-a-half hours. 
• Grouping like activities, e.g. work on phone calls, then switch to email, then switch to filing for the week.

Reality is that few people actually work like this.  The more common scenario is to bounce back and forth between activities.  You end up distracted all day.  Often you stay late or come in early because that is your personal “uninterrupted block.”  It is when you get most of your work done.

Adding more interruptions, in the form of checking your Facebook page, into an already distracting day is not a productivity tool.  Coker does hedge in saying that this Internet browsing should consume less than 20% of total work time.  20% of an 8-hour day is 96 minutes.  Do you feel that any employee who is surfing the Internet for 96 minutes is a productive part of your team?

If you are well-scheduled, you do benefit from a break.  However a more effective pause would be to get away from your desk.  Take a 10-minute walk to clear your head.  More computer time as a respite is not the answer.