I always wonder what percentage of corporate America's time is spent looking busy or alt-tabbing between a spreadsheet and solitaire when the boss walks by. If you could quantify it I bet the amount of waste is staggering.
Protip: plain text Project Gutenberg books in quarter-screen Tmux panes (under `less`, or your preferred command line text reading tool) looks almost like real work from all but the closest inspection. Less of a waste of time that Facebook/HN/Solitaire/whatever.
Fortunately I've only ever worked one place where that was super-useful, and only briefly. Got three novels read while also completing my work and doing a bunch of other work that I probably didn't need to, in ~2 months' time.
Except employers can't capture the value of eliminating that waste, because people who can actually do 40 hours of head-down intellectual work in a 40-hour workday are unicorns.
It's employees who get screwed by this - if their managers are too concerned about waste, they can't do anything like read a book or go for a walk, so they're on Facebook and Reddit, which are much less effective as breaks from focused work.
