There’s a classic line in the movie Office Space when Peter is in a meeting with the “workplace efficiency experts."  When they ask him what a typical day looks like for him, he tells them that he spends most of his day trying to look busy and, “I'd say in a given week I probably only do about fifteen minutes of real, actual, work.”

Your work week may be substantially more productive than that but the chances are good that you’re wasting as many as two hours every day, in addition to lunch.  A survey conducted by Salary.com and AOL reveals that young Americans are more likely to waste time at work than their older counterparts, and men are just as likely to do it as women.

Some examples of time-wasting activities include personal Internet use (such as checking email), socializing with co-workers, conducting personal business, spacing out, and running errands.  Whether you’re talking on the phone to family and friends, paying bills, writing and reading blogs, or gossiping at the coffee machine, all of these extraneous activities add up to a lot of time spent off-task.

There are some companies out there that consider these extraneous work activities to be beneficial to company culture.  Companies such as Google and Microsoft, for example, are famous for their relaxed approach toward work environments.  It is true that some jobs require a certain amount of time spent doing things that cannot be qualitatively measured.  Jobs that require a lot of creativity and problem solving tend to entail periods of intense thought that can look like spacing out to an outsider.

In fact, most managers expect employees to waste about an hour every day, in addition to lunch, and salary scales are constructed to reflect that.  This means that it’s fine to take a break whenever necessary and that your manager understands that you are not a robot.

This also means, however, that it would be prudent to keep an eye on how much time you’re actually devoting to work.  If your manager is observant at all, he or she will notice that the amount of work you produce is not commensurate with the amount of time you spend at work and that disparity could reflect poorly on you.

The best lesson to learn from this is to be aware of how you’re spending your time at work.  If you’re getting your work done and have oodles of time left at the end of the day, why not ask your boss for more work and make yourself look like a rock star in the process?  If you find that the only time you can get things done, besides the work you are getting paid to do, is while you’re at work it may be wise to reconsider how you’re spending your free time.

Do you find yourself getting off-task at work?  What are your biggest time wasters?  Do you think it’s a problem or is it simply a product of having the wide-open Internet in front of you all day?