How much time are your employees spending procrastinating?

Everyone is guilty of procrastination at some point, be it taking a 5 minute cigarette break, taking 15 minutes to go online shopping, or messaging on your phone from time to time.

According to a Music Magpie survey of 2,000 full time workers from across the UK, the average person spends 2 hours 11 minutes each day procrastinating, costing businesses over £21 billion* each year!

Messaging others on their phones took up the most time, coming in at 28 minutes a day, followed by daydreaming which takes up 20 minutes, and gossiping (18 minutes).

Interestingly, among the 10 procrastination methods included in the survey - going on Facebook to going to the toilet for a poo, men spent more time on almost every aspect. The only area where women wasted more time than men is gossiping.

This made men the bigger time wasters, procrastinating for 2 hours 51 minutes each day, compared to just 1 hour 52 minutes for women.

By sector, beauty workers were procrastinating the most (4 hours 57 minutes), spending 46 minutes of their day gossiping, 38 minutes on Facebook and 45 minutes messaging others on their phones. This was followed by those in IT/digital, clocking in 4 hours 2 minutes a day, and employees in art and design (3 hours 38 minutes).

On the other side of the spectrum, agriculture and environment workers procrastinated the least - for only 57 minutes everyday. Those in childcare & education, as well as law, politics & government were also relatively productive, procrastinating only for 1 hour 16 minutes and 1 hour 34 minutes respectively.

*Note: The cost of procrastination is calculated based on 261 working days each year, 24,213,000 full-time workers and an average wage of £28,677.

Infographic / Music MagpieLead image / 123RF