10 December 2007

Just give us the $500 grand and we'll go away.

| johnboy
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The Register have had the brilliant idea of figuring out their cost to the global economy and then asking for the money to go away.

Which got me wondering how much this website costs the ACT’s employers every year.

So here’s how it works.

In the last 12 months we had 722,502 visits.

We estimate that 80% of those were from Canberra, or 578,001.6

Of those our analysis suggests 60% were in work hours, leaving 346,801.

We also know that the average time on the site per visit is 4.5 minutes so that’s a total wasted work time of 1,560,604 minutes. That’s 27,510 hours.

Conservatively pricing your time at $25/hour we get a grand total of $687,751 this website is costing the ACT economy each year.

Being generous souls we’re happy to knock that down to $500,000 and be done with it.

So with one easy payment of $500,000 to fund our alcoholism, the ACT would save itself the best part of $100,000 in the first year alone with savings, savings, savings, to be had in the out years.

You know it makes sense.

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Most government departments (that I am aware of) monitor online time at work so people where I work don’t access the internet for personal use unless at lunch time and even then are pretty careful about what sites they visit. In fact the managers in the last department I worked recieved a list of the sites visited by their staff in working hours.

Absenteeism is pretty high in some government departments so maybe many are visiting the site from home with their hot lemon and honey at hand.

Desmo_V twin9:12 am 12 Dec 07

Hook, line and sinker..

Maelinar, no need to justify anything to me pal.

V Twin – I just noticed the malingerer comment in the battlespam.

Lets do some quick math:

300 applications for funding spread over 30 days = an average of 10/day.

Lets break that down to 5 in the morning and 5 in the afternoon. Each application can take anything up to an hour to assess critically, but averages out over a spread.

Add in a lunch break, and thats 11 individual clearing the head moments / day while better serving the Australian public by ensuring a distinctive gap between assessments.

Malingerer ? Timewaster ? – I think those would be hard to prove given that I have increased office productivity substantially since I started.

I would more reasonably consider that I’m just pretty good at time management.

Geez – is the labor club known for its coffee? And since when did brewed coffee become essential to get through the day??

OK – I will admit to reading this site at work.

Felix the Cat10:09 pm 10 Dec 07

I only have very limited internet access at work so don’t post or read here during work hours (too busy anyway).

Sepi,
the best I have witnessed, by far, is the”ant-like” line of pubes, marching into the Belco Labor Club coffee shop – then queing for 20 mins.

It’s legitimate for people to read Riotact during working hours if it is incidental. Four-and-a-half minutes is a third of a coffee break, so I would assume people are taking a brief mental break or checking out RiotAct during a lull, or at lunchtime. You would need to discount much of your traffic between midday and 2 pm.
And re Sepi’s issue about going out for coffee during working hours – departments should get their own espresso machines in the workplace. In my team of 17 people, at least two hours a day is lost between us variously fetching coffee for ourselves and each other from across the road …

V twin venom5:08 pm 10 Dec 07

“When dealing with a number of strongly related issues that have to be individually assessed for their own strengths and merits, it is beneficial to quickly switch topic so that there is a distinctive gap between the two.”

Must be lot and lots of issues Malingerer

Most of the remainder of IP addresses come out of sydney, which can be a little misleading as at least a few canberra based users will have an ISP that uses a sydney address

It happens all the time at fernhill park – you see people from all the departments and big companies out there down at momos.

It never happened when I worked at Russell, Campbell park, fernhill park or barton. (All places with not much access to cafes, but still) I was shocked when I started work in civic and people swanned off at morning tea time for 20 minutes.

Sepi,
it happens everywhere mate. I can confirm that

Going out for coffee during work hours seems to be something only Civic based pubes do. I’ve never encountered it anywhere else.

Actually the 80% Canberrans is based on Google Analytics’ IP tracking.

The 60% at work is based on the time of peak activity on the site coinciding with 8am-6pm. I’m willing to bet that for every reader who doesn’t work 9-5 there’s a fair number of them also hitting the site from work.

And there is, of course, a difference between not commenting on the site and not spending time reading it.

*sigh*

Anyway – Mike Crowther does ask a good question re: the 80% figure. Is that a guess? It would be an interesting statistic to see the number of Canberrans that make up the total users of RA.

James-T-Kirk1:17 pm 10 Dec 07

This is very interesting
I was chatting to one of Australia’s police forces recently, who have a policy of “Official Use Only” for the internet – no email, no surfing, no internet banking. none. They employ staff to detect and discipline.
The interesting bit was that they can’t hold permanent IT staff – They simply leave – so they end up paying contractors 2 – 3 times the normal rates to get work done.

Simplistic maths like that only helps bean counters.

By the way, when the organisations head of HR left (after a stint of about 1 million years), as part of his speach, he said how happy he was that he could keep a lid on ever increasing staff numbers.

OMG!

Mike Crowther1:14 pm 10 Dec 07

80%? What are you basing that on? I work evenings and spend a good part of my day on and off the ‘puter (incl the-riotact)…doesn’t cost my employer a penny. Then there’s pensioners, the unemployed, the self employed, those on flexi. And anyway, if I was an employer I’d be happy knowing my staff had their finger on the pulse of whats going on in this city.

RA actually improves the accuracy of my work, as I’m not confused/biased by related material.
I say we make that a tagline, and credit Maelinar.

I worked next to Thumper a few years ago. He posts between tasks, using RA and other sites as I do to clear the mind towards focussing on the next task.

When dealing with a number of strongly related issues that have to be individually assessed for their own strengths and merits, it is beneficial to quickly switch topic so that there is a distinctive gap between the two.

Therefore, RA actually improves the accuracy of my work, as I’m not confused/biased by related material.

There’s a large portion of posting on this site during 9-5 though. Posting absolutely dies after about 5:30pm and isn’t exactly huge on weekends.

If the sum gets paid do we get a share? 😀

Me neither. Surely the regulars do though! I wonder how much, if anything, Thumper actually gets done between posts…

Not all of us are at work 9-5 weekdays.
I don’t post from work.

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