There is a hot new phrase in the workplace these days — desktop breakfast. No, this is not the power breakfast that bankers and CEOs are so fond of. It is more the rank and file taking their coffee cups and cucumber sandwiches to their cubicles. “Desktop breakfast trend helps office workers waste time,” says officebroker.com. According to this UK-based real estate consultant, British workers waste 31 minutes in the morning.

Breakfast is seldom solitary. You start off with gossip around the coffee machine. But breakfast also means sharing pickles and plum cakes — and, of course, the recipes. This is not a female failing; surveys show that men waste more time at work than women do.

According to officebroker.com, workers “put away coats, visited the loo, read newspaper websites, checked personal emails, Facebook and other social networking sites, prepared food and drinks and chatted about non-work issues before finally settling down to start the day’s work.”

The first casualty is productivity. And, facing an economic slowdown, companies can ill afford to lose so much work time. But, according to HR consultants, the companies are themselves partly to blame. When you put extra pressure on your workforce, they will find ways to get out of it.

The increase-productivity brigade can take things to extremes. A multinational company ordained that work should start an hour earlier; it was either that or a pay cut. This didn’t really work in the West; in India, it was a disaster. In Mumbai, established train schedules went awry. There was no time to have breakfast at home. The end result was the desktop breakfast, to add to the lunch break.

In India, particularly at some government departments and public sector units, you will find people taking a siesta or playing cards during lunchtime. That’s traditional time wasting or, if you talk to the workers, the most productive time of the day. In more modern office settings, it’s Freecell unless an alert systems department has removed it from your computer. The diversions of choice are Facebook (visited by 41 per cent of the respondents in a salary.com survey), LinkedIn (37 per cent), Yahoo (31 per cent), Google (28 per cent), Amazon (25 per cent) and Twitter (8 per cent).

Does it help to block sites? It’s actually counterproductive. According to a KPMG International study, employees just move to their personal devices. With everybody having a smartphone, that’s not a problem. But the office computer allows some degree of monitoring; a personal device cannot be tracked.

Employees, however, don’t see Internet surfing as a form of time wasting. They believe it brings a better work-life balance. The real waste of time as perceived by employees (according to salary.com) is in attending unnecessary meetings. “Only 18 per cent of those surveyed listed the Internet as a time waster,” says the salary.com report. “The biggest waste of time, according to 47 per cent of our respondents, is having to attend too many meetings. That’s followed by dealing with office politics (43 per cent), fixing other peoples' mistakes (37 per cent), coping with annoying coworkers (36 per cent), and returning an abundance of work emails (20 per cent). Dealing with bosses came in last at a mere 14 per cent.”

There are a couple of other interesting findings. First, more than two-thirds —69 per cent — of men reported using the Internet for personal reasons during work hours on a daily basis, compared to 62 per cent of women. Second, it is not the young who are most hooked on the Net; workers between the ages of 26 and 35 topped the list, with 75 per cent wasting time at work on a daily basis. Finally, educated workers waste more time. Food for thought? Perhaps the desktop breakfast may be serving more than the inner man.