Time Sucking Waste

What eats up your time during the day?

What would you say is the biggest time-waster in your daily life?

Is it Blogging?

Is it MySpace?

Maybe it's Twitter?

Is it Facebook?

What about your cellphone and all those text messages you send and receive all day?

We were told that the computer age was a time of phenomenal leaps in human productivity, but recently the experts say we have reached a new plateau. Increased productivity at this point, barring new technological advances, is unlikely.

I say we can't move forward because we're bleeding time all day as a consequence of some of this new technology. Granted, I'm not arguing that removing all these things I just mentioned would have a giant effect on an entire nation's ability to be productive. But on a personal level, how much more would you get done if you turned off your cell phone and couldn't access any social websites? Can you imagine if no one outside of work could contact you all day long? Imagine if the only time anyone bothered you while you were working was if it was for something that actually related to what you were already working on? Wouldn't that be amazing?

Boring as hell, yes, but also amazing in a certain way.

I never give out my work email address to people outside of work. I can't stand to have emails in my work inbox that aren't related to my projects. I don't know why exactly. I have access to my internet email accounts and I check them from time-to-time. But I can't stand the idea of those emails being in my work inbox instead. I just don't want them there. They don't belong there and would simply annoy me.

I've heard that many corporations are joining a new trend in which they encourage their employees to use sites like Twitter or Facebook to improve workplace productivity and communication.

I can't imagine this helping. The only way it could work for me would be if I created a special account and never added any friends or followed anyone that wasn't a coworker. Can you imagine getting poked, or superpoked, or receiving a bumper sticker, or having flair sent to you all day at work? Do you really want to know when the guy in the office next to you is going to take a poop because he's posted it to his status?

Yes, when I Twitter I post that I'm pooping. That's what Twitter is for, stupid things like that.

Yeah, I know that a bunch of HR people have turned Twitter into a giant networking tool. I'm sure they've already proven me wrong. But I'm not in HR. I'm in IT. Our idea of networking is to join a Microsoft User's Group and talk about the latest .NET Framework updates and crap like that. We aren't a big networky kind of group unless you want to talk about the latest Star Trek movie or something.

Anyway, I'm just curious. What do you consider your biggest time-waster on a daily basis? What sucks the hours out of your day so that before you know it everyone is going home and you're saying to yourself "what happened? Where did the day go?"