Comparison “Points”

From time to time, we get reports from firms that purport to tell us how much work time is spent in preparations for certain non-work-related activities: the NCAA basketball pools, the Super Bowl, online shopping at the holidays. Those “studies” generally make some assumptions about the amount of time people spend on the workplace pools as well as how many people will participate, and their compensation levels, and—voila—the productive time ostensibly “lost” to these activities. Now, they make a lot of assumptions to get to that result, including the assumption that, but for these activities, people would be doing nothing but working.