To encourage worker productivity offices prohibit Internet use. Consequently, many employees delay Internet activity to the end of the workday. Recent work in social psychology, however, suggests that using willpower to delay gratification can negatively impact performance. We report data from an experiment where subjects in a Willpower Treatment are asked to resist the temptation to join others in watching a humorous video for 10 minutes. In relation to a baseline treatment that does not require will power, we show that resisting this temptation detrimentally impacts economic productivity on a subsequent task.

I can't decide what is the worst thing about this study. As far as I can tell from skimming through the full working paper, the researchers gave some people boring tasks to do and measured how difficult it was for them to control their willpower under specific conditions.

Is the work people do really so boring that it can be said to be equivalent to 'counting tasks'? If so, they probably deserve to have access to the internet in order to stretch their mental muscles.

Despite the lofty conclusions drawn from the study, no consideration is given to the fact that work is not a controlled environment. People bring in their own distractions (from stress balls to smartphones), and their colleagues provide more opportunities for distraction. The command and control assumptions in the study hark back to an older (and less wise) era.

Surely the real answer is to worry less about the distractions and concentrate on the reasons why someone would rather surf the net than do the work. Make the work more interesting, valuable, motivating, and people won't be distracted -- the work will win over the lure of Facebook and Twitter. If you can't do that, why is a human being doing that work? Maybe the managers and leaders are really the people who need to work harder.