A new study suggests Americans waste 50 minutes a day a work, but you can do much better than that if you try hard enough

If you’re not reading this at work, you should be: according to a new paper, American employees spend an average of 50 minutes of their working day engaged in non-work, ie slacking off. That may not seem like a lot to you; indeed, it may not seem like enough. Fully half of this time was spent eating, which isn’t slacking, it’s consuming food you didn’t have time to ram down your throat during your too-short lunch break.

There is plenty of evidence to suggest that a certain amount of loafing is actually good for productivity, because it restores concentration and enhances creativity. One measure of an optimum work-to-slack ratio suggests that 17 minutes of break time should be taken out of every hour. A 2011 University of Melbourne study found that people who surfed the internet at work – up to a maximum of about 20% of their total office time – were more productive than people who didn’t.

But this misses the point, which is that productivity is someone else’s problem. Your problem is to earn enough money to be able to afford your life, and one sure way to make your life cheaper is to live some of it at work, where they have to have the heat on anyway. If you need to improve your overall slacking performance, try this simple five-point plan:

1. Keep track of how much work you accidentally do outside the office. This includes any good ideas that happen to come to you while showering, work emails you read out of boredom on public transport, and any leisure minutes spent worrying about getting sacked. All this time should be clawed back during office hours by shopping online.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Reading emails while commuting? Claw back the time during office hours. Photograph: Ben Pipe Photography/Getty Images/Cultura RF

2. There is a point in space, roughly midway between the surface of your computer screen and your nose, where all your daydreams may be indulged. Learn to focus on it.

3. Clacking away at a keyboard may make you look busy, but true productivity is the end product of a lot of time spent being visibly less occupied: thinking is work; musing is work; speculating is work; putting yourself in a good frame of mind for work is work. To an untrained observer like your immediate supervisor, this type of mental expenditure looks remarkably similar to wondering if you left your keys on the bus, so feel free mix it up a little.

4. A lot research indicates that taking afternoon naps of between 20 to 30 minutes will increase your ability to focus and complete tasks. Your boss is unlikely to agree. If you must sleep in the office, lie down under your desk with your legs hanging out. If anyone catches you you can always pretend you were plugging something back in.

5. Once you get the hang of it, slacking is addictive in a way that work never will be. If you find yourself having to ration your YouTube viewing in order to get anything at all done in a day, then you’ve got the balance about right. Leave early.