The Boss Button

March Madness is just around the corner. Basketball fans everywhere are preparing or have prepared their brackets and are saving up for pools and bets. Currently the conference championships are underway, with lower end teams (and their fans) hoping to get that automatic bid. What might surprise these people is the amount of time that will be wasted in businesses across the United States during this hectic time of the basketball season.

This article from Today News states that according to a recent study, about $2 billion is lost in productivity during March Madness. So what is keeping workers from getting things done? CBSSports and ESPN3 are only two of the many hundreds of websites that support streaming video coverage of sporting events. These will likely cater to the many employees stuck at work during the day while this tournament is at hand. Rather than miss their favorite team or a game of vital importance to their bracket, workers will watch the games on their computer while at work, listen to the radio through concealed headphones lining their jacket, and constantly check score updates through mobile phone internet connections.

As is typical when there is something more exciting happening in your life, everything else is in a way put on the back burner. This seems to be the case with the workplace during March Madness. It seems that many people in today’s workforce are not interested, engaged or challenged in their jobs. This isn’t necessarily true for all employees, but it is normal for the grunt workers and lower level staff of big businesses to scrape by day in and day out only giving the bare minimum to not get in trouble.

Perhaps this is a generalization but the point is that there are many people who would rather be escaping the drudgery of the workplace to live in the world of a multitude of entertaining basketball games (or anything else that can take their mind off of the doldrums that they are experiencing in the workplace).

Perhaps the most amusing thing about this MSNBC article is the idea of the Boss Button. I find this hilarious and so impactful to the meaning behind wasting time. The Boss Button is a button on the CBSSports’s website that is available when viewing their streaming video. When you’re boss comes near, you click on the Boss Button, and instantly a spreadsheet full of some random data appears on your screen in place of the game that you were watching. Although creative, functional, and in my opinion hilarious, this idea highlights the idea of doing something when you should be putting your effort into something else. People choose entertainment time and time again over the option to enhance their career or their life by giving the extra effort to get ahead.