How to Vapourise Time

I'm having a rare day at home on my own, whilst the truck gets serviced. The day started off without electricity, but that was OK as I had time to make a list of all the things I urgently needed to do, like finish the accounts, sort out insurance, study for my Food Handlers certificate and write my report for the RBVIYC Board meeting tomorrow. 

Have I done these things?

Hell no.

I spent over an hour looking through Savuer to find an article on rum. It was, of course, in the very last magazine I looked at. Then I spent an awful lot of time trying to get the scanner to work. So I 'rewarded' myself with a bit of Facebook. That was 30 minutes vapourised. Then I decided to catch up on my blog. After fiddling with camera's, Windows 8 and links - I'd lost another 2 hours. As a short aside, can I tell you howmuch I truly loathe Windows 8. It's for teenagers with lots of time to waste. I'm middle-aged with no time at all. Windows 8 and Me are incompatible therefore.

Anyway I'm pretty much back to my normal day now, with nothing started yet. I despair of myself somedays. But I'm not the only one. This was a brilliant article in the Financial Times a few weeks ago by Lucy Kellaway:

"One day last week I was sitting at my desk reading an academic paper on cyber loafing when I glanced at my screen and saw a colleague had tweeted: “This shouldn’t be funny but it is.” I clicked on the link and found a series of pictures of ships with silly names. There was HMS Gay Viking, HMS Spanker, SS Lesbian, USS Saucy, SS Iron Knob. At first I laughed but, as I read on to HMS Cockchafer and HMS Grappler, I thought: surely not? Thus I found myself checking on Wikipedia and discovering HMS Cockchafer was the fifth Royal Navy ship of that name, that it was built in 1915, defended the southeast coast of England during the first world war and was later part of the Anglo-Soviet invasion of Iran.

The reason I’m flaunting this disgraceful theft of time from my employer is that I was reading (before I got distracted) a shocking piece of research telling me that...the average US worker spends 60-80 per cent of their time online at work doing things unrelated to their jobs.

Until a couple of years ago I thought skiving was a non-problem. The answer, I thought, was to fire extreme slackers and give the rest of us more work to do. But I don’t think that any more. I cyber loaf even when I’m extremely busy, which means I often work at weekends to catch up. I find the temptation to waste time online is so great that it swamps everything else. It feeds almost every need I have. It’s a drug, and I can’t help myself.

Some people heroically try to pretend there is nothing to worry about. Researchers from the National University of Singapore recently concluded that surfing the internet at work is actually a good thing, as it reduces stress and leaves you feeling refreshed. I dare say this might be right for the first five minutes or so. It was soothing for my mind to alight briefly on SS Iron Knob. But what wasn’t soothing was the helter-skelter ride I took from there that left me guilty, angry with myself, stressed about undone work and about as satisfied as if I’d eaten a whole tube of sour cream and onion Pringles.

...I’ve just sent out a tweet asking if anyone has found a fail-safe way of getting off Twitter and back to work. The great Tom Peters replied at once: “Just ignore it and move on!” – the speed of his response rather undermining his advice. More honest was the man who simply tweeted “no”.