Study: "Information Overload" on the Web Costing $900 Billion a Year

Posted 12/31/2008 at 8:51am | by Paul Lilly

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Have you ever sat down and itemized the time you spend on the web doing non-work related tasks? You know, things like forwarding jokes via email, updating your Facebook profile, catching up on forum threads, and everything else that's non-conducive to your job. According to a new study, you may be far more unproductive on any given work day than you might have imagined, and collectively, dilly-dallying on the web is costing the economy around $900 billion each year. Yowzers!

Preposterous? Not to Basex, a New York-based research company who has been focusing its efforts on analyzing what it calls "information overload." In its ongoing study, Basex says the average worker loses 28 percent of his time to interruptions, while information workers spend 15 percent of the day searching. All tallied, only 25 percent of the workday is spent on "productive content creation," or in other words, actual work. Technophiles aren't immune to wandering aimlessly on the web, either.

"We recognize that as younger workers come into the workforce, they are more handy with technologies, they're more comfortable using them," Basex CEO Joseph Spira says, "but that doesn't mean they use them any more intelligently."

Hey, that reminds us - stop whatever work you're doing and go sign up for Will Smith's Twitter feed for your chance at winning some cool swag.