You get to work, sit down and log into your computer. What’s the first thing that happens after that? Check your email? Check the web? Answer IM messages perhaps? How much of that is actually related to work (ok.. maybe the email messages)? Think about it. In a given day, how many times are you interrupted by IM messages, or emails or text messages? Now here’s an interesting article over at CNN.com that says IMing at work is costing U.S. businesses as much as $588 billion dollars a year in lost worker productivity. Does that seem far fetched to you or do you believe those numbers (or maybe think the numbers should be even higher)? I fall into the group that totally believes in that lost productivity notion and also that it probably costs businesses even more than $588 billion dollars.

Some interesting stats along the way from the CNN article:

• U.S. office workers get interrupted on the job as much as 11 times an hour
• Office distractions consume up to 2.1 hours of the average work day
• It takes us on average five minutes to recover from an interruption and return to our original tasks at hand

I wonder what the total global productivity loss is – especially in Asian countries where text messaging via mobile phones is so much more prevalent than here in the states.

While instant messaging, and email has brought us all a little closer – sometimes one can’t help but wonder if we’re actually better of because of it.

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