Employers have little to fear from a spot of cyber-skiving
I want to tell you two true stories. They are about sex and money and what the masters (and mistresses) of the universe get up to at work when they think no one is looking.
The first is about a derivatives trader who works at one of the big City banks. He is in his mid-40s, unhappily married, with a couple of children at one of the most famous schools in the country. He is pretty successful, leads a flash life and is entertaining in a wide-boy sort of a way: long on one-liners if a little short on grammar and syntax.
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I know about this man because a friend of mine talks to him most weekday afternoons on the internet. She found him a couple of months ago on a dating site, and they have been chatting a lot since. Maybe they will meet, maybe they will not. I think the existence of a wife is a slight drawback from my friend's point of view. Still, that is not relevant for the purposes of this column.
The second story is about a shirt, a high-flying lawyer and a journalist.
The shirt, purple with a thin red stripe, started life in an Agnès B store some time ago. It then went to an Oxfam shop where it was bought by a City lawyer. She never wore it, so decided to sell it on Ebay. One Wednesday afternoon not long ago the journalist bought the shirt for ￡4. The two exchanged e-mails, and the lawyer, surprised to recognise the journalist's name at the bottom of her e-mail, offered the shirt for nothing. The journalist was equally surprised to find the seller was the head of the legal department at a big City bank.
These two stories tell us something about top-level cyber-skiving. The protagonists are not bored clerical workers whiling away the tedious hours until home time. They are senior people who hold down big jobs in workaholic organisations. Yet one is spending his afternoons chatting up my friend online. The other, in spite of what must be a monumental salary, is spending hers trying to recoup on Ebay the tiny outlay of buying an unsuccessful shirt from Oxfam.
As for the journalist (whom you might have correctly identified as me), she is wasting her time trawling for cheap second-hand shirts that she does not need, when she should be writing columns instead.
What interests me in all this is not just the endless weakness of human nature but how technology now allows these foibles to be indulged at work.
Never mind firewalls and company policies blocking access to dodgy websites. Cyber-skiving is a fact of life at all levels in all companies. According to a recent survey in the US, 87 per cent of US office workers go on the internet at work for personal things, and half do so many times a day. Far from feeling remorse, the majority of these skivers said that what they were up to had no adverse effect on productivity at all.
Surely this cannot be true? If people spend hours online, it follows that there are fewer hours left in which to work.
So what did we get up to in those long ago, pre-internet days? Did we just work harder? If I try to cast my mind back, I find the answer is no. I think the amount of work that gets done is a fairly fixed quantity, and in most managerial jobs is pitifully low. It depends on the type of company we work for, how ambitious we are and how much pressure we are under.
Before the internet we simply wasted time in different ways. I remember doing something on a regular basis that hardly anyone does any more. It was called havinglunch, and with lunch came the ultimate productivity no-no: alcohol.
When I worked in the City in the early 1980s we routinely used to have two or three-hour largely liquid lunches and return to the office with just enough time left to make a few mistakes before rolling off home.
The other thing that has all but gone is aimless chatting. In the old days one could chat for hours. While I still manage to squeeze a certain amount of chatting into the working day, I feel I have to chat fast and furiously as people need to get back to work. Or rather, get back to their computers to chat by e-mail.
The amount of time we spend at our desks is much longer: the day has been stretched out at both ends, there is no lunch, and very little chatter. We have to do something to fill the hours, so what we do is cyber-skive.
Most workers do this horribly badly. Frightened of being caught skiving, and with the puritanical idea that there is something intrinsically wrong with it, they skive away all day on things that could just about pass for work, only they are neither productive nor especially enjoyable. People spend hours reading and writing aimless, tedious blogs. They trawl newspapers online and draft very long e-mails to the journalists who wrote them.
I hope that some of the readers who send me 1,000-word e-mails are paying attention. To skive like this is a terrible waste. They would be much better advised to spend their non-productive time more pleasurably.
The first rule of skiving is to do chores you would otherwise have to do at home. So doing supermarket shopping and booking holidays in office hours is surely a good thing for everyone. When all those necessary things have been done, you can limit yourself to things that are enjoyable (so long as they are legal, and involve neither porn nor gambling). You could do Ebay, or dating or indulge another foible of choice.
As for employers, they should pretend to disapprove but continue to turn a blind eye. After all, a bit of outrageous cyber-skiving leaves one feeling a bit cheerful and a bit guilty. Which is the perfect frame of mind in which to tackle a bit of proper work.
教你在网上磨洋工
我
想给你们讲两个真实的故事。故事内容涉及性、金钱，以及宇宙的主人们在认为无人注意的时候，会在工作时间做些什么。
第一个故事中，主人公是一位在伦敦金融城某大银行工作的衍生品交易员。他45岁左右，婚姻不幸，一双子女在英国最著名的学校之一上学。他的事业相当成功，过着光鲜的生活，多少有点爱耍小聪明。如果说他在语法和句法方面有点弱的话，讲俏皮话则是他的强项。
我之所以知道这个人，是因为我的一个朋友差不多在每个工作日的下午都会和他在互联网上交谈。她是几个月前在一个约会网站上认识他的，自那以后，他们便经常聊天。也许他们将来会见面，也许不会。我认为，在我的朋友看来，那人妻子的存在是一个小小的缺憾。不过，这个问题与本期专栏的意图无关。
第二个故事讲的是一件衬衣、一位胸怀大志的律师和一位记者。
这件带红色细条纹的紫色衬衣，最先出现在一家Agnès B商店里。然后它来到了一家乐施会(Oxfam)商店，被金融城的一位律师买走。她从未穿过这件衬衣，于是决定将它放到eBay网上出售。不久前一个周三的下午，一位记者出价4英镑（合7.60美元）买下这件衬衣。两人互发电子邮件，律师惊讶地从邮件末尾处认出了记者的名字，于是决定分文不要，将衬衣送给记者。记者也同样惊奇地发现，卖家正是金融城某大银行法律部门的主管。
这两个故事讲述了高层人士在网上磨洋工的事。故事的主角不是无聊的办公室职员，那些在下班前打发乏味工作时间的人。他们是高层人士，在“工作第一”的机构里从事重要工作。但是，其中一位把下午的时间都拿来和我的朋友在网上聊天。而另一位，尽管肯定是薪水不菲，却把时间花在了eBay网上，试图为自己从乐施会买来的一件不成功的衬衣找到下家，挽回微不足道的损失。
至于那位记者（或许你已猜出来，那就是我），在应该写专栏的时候，她却在浪费时间，淘换自己并不需要的廉价二手衬衣。
令我感兴趣的，不仅是人性中无穷无尽的弱点，还有科技让人们在工作中纵容这些弱点的程度。
不用担心防火墙和公司禁止访问无聊网站的政策。在所有公司、所有级别的职员之中，上网磨洋工都是一个不争的事实。美国最近的一项调查发现，美国87%的职员在工作时间都会因私上网，而半数职员每天会这么做很多次。其中多数人不是感到自责，而是表示，他们所做的事，对自己的工作效率根本没有任何负面影响。
这肯定不会是事实？如果人们长时间上网，那么工作时间就会减少。
那么在很久之前、互联网还未诞生的日子里，我们都干了些什么呢？我们是工作得更努力吗？当我回想从前的时候，我发现答案是否定的。我认为，我们要完成的工作量基本上是固定的，而在绝大多数管理类工作中，工作量少得可怜。这取决于我们所在公司的类型、我们的野心如何以及我们承受的压力有多大。
在互联网诞生之前，我们不过是用其它方式来浪费时间而已。我记得，我会经常做些现在几乎没有人会做的事情，比如吃午餐，而伴以午餐的则是工作效率的最大禁忌：酒。
上世纪80年代初，我在金融城工作时，我们一般都会花上两三个小时，吃一顿主要由液体构成的午餐。回到办公室的时候，剩下的时间刚好够我们再犯几个错误，然后就该滚回家了。
另外一件我们现在基本不再做的事情，便是漫无目的得聊天。以前，人们可以一下聊上几个小时。尽管我现在仍然会设法在工作中挤出一点时间来聊天，但我感到自己不得不聊得飞快，因为人们需要回去工作，或者是，需要回到电脑前通过电邮聊天。
我们花在办公桌前的时间长了很多：日子的被拉长了，没有午餐，聊天很少。我们不得不做些事情来打发时间，于是我们在网上磨洋工。
多数职员“磨”得非常糟糕。由于他们害怕被抓住在磨洋工，并抱有严格的道德观念，认为这么做本身是不对的，因此他们整天在网上干的几乎都是那些被视为工作的内容，只是他们不但效率不高，而且没有感觉特别享受。人们花几个小时，阅读和写作不知所云、单调乏味的博客。他们在网上浏览报纸，给文章作者写冗长的电邮。
我希望一些给我发送1000字电邮的读者注意到了这个问题。这样磨洋工，是一种可怕的浪费。最好建议他们，以更愉悦的方式来打发他们低效率的工作时间。
磨洋工的首要原则是，做一些在家里也不得不做的零星事务。因此，在办公时间去超市购物，安排假日行程，对每个人来说肯定都是件好事。当所有这些需要办的事情都做完时，你可以节制地做一些能带来享受的事情（只要它们是合法的，不涉及色情和赌博）。你可以上eBay购物，或者约会，或者纵容另外一个弱点。
对于雇主来说，他们应该假装不赞同这种做法，但继续睁只眼闭只眼。毕竟，一点点可恶的网上磨洋工，会使人们会感到一点点振奋，还有一点点内疚。这正是适当处理一点工作的完美心态。
