Worried your employees are spending all their valuable work time aimlessly surfing the internet? Well, these fears might be justified according to a new survey sponsored by price comparison site moneysupermarket.com. Around a quarter of over 2000 UK adults questioned said they spent a third of their time on the internet surfing with no purpose. So there’s another useless stat to roll out alongside the supposed three days a year we spend on the toilet or two months watching TV. And, unsurprisingly, someone’s invented another witty acronym for this; wilfing - 'what am I looking for?' - is the term you’ll need to remember when you next have a meeting to discuss a revised acceptable web usage policy.

Men are worse at this than women apparently, with adult entertainment web sites proving to be a particularly noteworthy distraction – about one third of UK men admitted wilfing had damaged their relationship. Aside from telling us what we already knew – that if you give ‘em half a chance, your staff will probably spend a lot of their office time doing personal stuff on the net – there’s not much else in the way of insight for IT managers here. It highlights again the difficult balance of being a fair and liberal employer but ensuring your workforce gets the job done and doesn’t take the piss.

As a footnote, some of the reported stories of this survey in the press have suggested wilfing may be  endemic these days because although people go on the net with a purpose, they are soon distracted if they can’t find exactly what they are looking for. Maybe with the much-heralded coming of the semantic web, searches will actually produce accurate, meaningful results. It won’t stop men looking at adult porn sites in their spare time though.