Personal Finance

Americans spend nearly two hours a day shopping online at work, study suggests

Key Points
  • More than half of employed Americans confess to shopping online while on the clock.
  • On average, workers spend about 1.7 hours a day browsing the internet, a study finds.
How to outsmart the holiday shopping season
VIDEO29:5129:51
How to outsmart the holiday shopping season

Don't expect to get much done during the month of December.

With the holidays around the corner, workers spend about 1.7 hours of the day shopping online, according to a new study conducted by Finder.com.

Overall, 57 percent of employed Americans confessed to shopping while on the clock, the personal finance site said, totaling some 234 million hours a day browsing the internet. Finder polled over 2,000 adults in June.

"That's a significant chunk of time people are not doing their job," said Jennifer McDermott, Finder's consumer advocate.

A separate survey by CareerBuilder similarly found that more than half of workers said they spend at least some work time holiday shopping online.

A woman browses the Reebonz website on a laptop. Singapore-based Reebonz, is Southeast Asia's biggest luxury e-commerce company.
Bloomberg | Getty Images

Deal hunting doesn't stop there either, Finder found. The majority of employed Americans also admitted to browsing travel destinations while working, spending an average of 1.3 hours a day planning their next getaway.

Collectively, Americans spend an estimated 180 million hours a day searching for their next vacation.

To stay better focused on the task at hand, McDermott advises employees to shut off their internet connection altogether while they complete work on a project, then set a timer to take a break to browse online. McDermott suggests a shooting for a five-minute time limit.

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Sounds crazy, but employees are leaving money on the table

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