Lost Projects

[Jules Richardson]

On Fri, 2005-08-05 at 11:11 -0400, John Allain wrote:
> This thought crossed my mind many moons ago offline,
> here it is on-list.
> 
> If the amount of lost time spent reading offtopic and other
> time wasting threads is were counted up
> 
> assume
>    800 readers, 100 full-time, 700 part time
>    80+ posts a day, 30,000 a year
>    1 second to read a header, 10 seconds to skim a post
>    1/3 of posts off-topic and other
> 
> then time wasted is
>    100 x 1/3 x 30,000 x 10 / 3,600 ~= 2,800
>   +700 x 1/3 x 30,000 x 1 / 3,600  ~= 1,900
>    = 4,700  = 2 1/3 man-Years wasted

Don't we all just look at the subject line and ditch messages that
aren't of interest to us (OT or just not something that suits our
individual tastes)?

Plus, didn't you miss out days in the above calculation? Even assuming
the ten second part is correct, isn't it:

   100 x 1/3 x 30,000 x 10 / 3,600 ~= 2,800 hours
  +700 x 1/3 x 30,000 x 1 / 3,600  ~= 1,900 hours

 = 4,700 hours = 196 man-days (approx 1/2 man-year)

I think that's an order of magnitude less than time spent in the
bathroom... :-)

cheers

Jules