text: The average worker spends a full day of their work week doing things other than, well, work. 
   
   A survey from staffing firm OfficeTeam found the average office employee spends 56 minutes per day using their cell phone at work for non-work activity. That’s 43% more than the 39 minutes most managers said they thought occurred. 
   
   That works out to just under five hours per week of goofing off on phones. Personal email and social media made up the majority of the wasted time, with sports sites, mobile gaming, and shopping placing a far distant third, fourth, and fifth place. 
   
   More than half of the 600+ office employees surveyed said they used their phones to access websites blocked by company IT departments. 
   
   Phones weren’t the only ways employees waste time, though. The average employee spends 42 minutes a day—3.5 hours a week—attending to personal tasks, such as errands, according to the survey. 
   
   Added together, that’s nearly 8 hours a week of total lost productivity. 
   
   And if the office is mostly comprised of younger workers, the amount of lost time jumps dramatically. Employees ages 18 to 34 rack up 70 minutes on mobile devices and 48 minutes on personal tasks each work day—the most of all age groups—a total of just under 10 hours per week. 
   
   “It’s understandable that employees may occasionally use their mobile devices or attend to personal tasks during business hours. But these activities can easily become big distractions,” said Brandi Britton, a district president for OfficeTeam. ||||| The time office workers spend checking their phones for emails, texts or social media updates while on the job adds up — to about eight hours of the workweek. 
   
   WASHINGTON — How much time do you spend checking your phone for emails, texts or social media updates while at work? Hours, if you’re like most office rats. 
   
   A survey of professionals by staffing firm OfficeTeam found that office workers squander an average of 56 minutes a day, or nearly five hours a week, using their mobile devices for non-work activities in the office. 
   
   Add to that another 42 minutes a day, on average, spent doing other personal tasks, and the average employee could be wasting more than eight hours per workweek on activities unrelated to their jobs. 
   
   Younger workers are even bigger offenders. Those under 35 rack up an average of 70 minutes on mobile devices and 48 additional minutes on personal tasks each work day. 
   
   “It’s understandable that employees may occasionally use their mobile devices or attend to personal tasks during business hours. But these activities can easily become big distractions,” said Brandi Britton, a district president for OfficeTeam. 
   
   “To best manage their time, staff can take advantage of breaks during lunch and throughout the day to catch up on non-work email or errands,” she said. 
   
   The phone also is a way around company policy. 
   
   OfficeTeam said 58 percent of office workers surveyed say they use their personal devices at work to visit websites that are banned by their companies, but bosses haven’t necessarily caught on, with only 39 percent of managers saying they think that happens commonly. 
   
   Sixty-eight percent of men frequently use their cellphones to access blocked websites in the office compared to 43 percent of women. 
   
   OfficeTeam’s survey included responses from more than 600 workers employed in office environments and senior managers at U.S. companies with 20 or more employees. 
   
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target: – Everyone knows smartphones can steal hours from a day, but employees are turning to their mobile devices while on the clock, too. A new survey by staffing firm OfficeTeam finds that office workers spend an average of 56 minutes a day on their cell phones while at work, and another 42 minutes a day doing other personal tasks. That's nearly five hours of personal phone time a week, and a total of more than eight hours of broader personal time, notes WTOP. Not only that, but most bosses underestimate the time waste on phones to be closer to 39 minutes a day—and workers younger than 35 are averaging a whopping 70 minutes of their day on their phones and 48 minutes on other personal matters. "It's understandable that employees may occasionally use their mobile devices or attend to personal tasks during business hours," OfficeTeam's' district president says. "But these activities can easily become big distractions." Fortune reports that most of the personal time on phones is spent on social media and non-work email; in distant third, fourth, and fifth places come sports sites, mobile gaming, and shopping. Beyond this, the survey found that 58% of office workers visit pages their company prohibits, but there's a breakdown between the sexes: 68% of men do this, compared to just 43% of women. (In the UK, some women get time off to cope with menstrual pain.)