So many minutes a day we do absolutely nothing at the office

You come home after a day of work and think: wow, I'm exhausted. What a busy day. What a long workday. What a lot done.

Well, not really. Because when you're at work, you actually spend a lot of minutes per day doing absolutely nothing. Nada. Staring into space. Chatting with your neighbor. Sitting in the sun and drinking coffee. Getting coffee. Making coffee. Washing the coffee cup. That kind of stuff. On average, we do about 50 minutes of nothing at work each day. That's almost an hour. Excluding lunch break, mind you, let that be clear. Worn out after eight hours of work? Just count: you've actually only worked a solid seven hours and are complaining for nothing.

What are we most distracted by? Especially chatty colleagues, the smartphone and online shopping are our favorites when we're not busy with our actual tasks. It is estimated that all this loafing costs companies in the Netherlands about 50 billion a year. Just calculate all those hours that you get paid for doing nothing.

Working productively has also become increasingly difficult because we are now always reachable via phone. On average, we check our screens five times an hour. Five times an hour. A normal sixty minutes in a row being completely focused on your work, not peeking at social media, not talking, not going to the bathroom, not walking around, not drinking anything, not drifting off to any websites – who can still do that? No one. We are all addicted to distraction.

Yet all this drifting off also has its advantages. Because you might actually become a bit more creative through distraction at work. You can think more clearly about the work that is still waiting for you, and you are also more motivated to get to work in the remaining 7 hours and 10 minutes. People simply cannot work for hours on end without doing something else. Our brains are not built for that. And just when you relax, you can concentrate better again.

So don't worry too much if your colleague is chatting with you about her weekend again. You're actually doing well. As long as she doesn't chat longer than 50 minutes, okay?.