Empirical studies on this matter have shown me that almost everyone spends some of their working time surfing non work related sites - the SDMB being a perfectly good example.
Surfing has the added benefit of being a not completely obvious way to relax, which talking to office buddies or reading a magazine aren’t.
So what did people do before the internet? Did you guys actually work the whole time you were at your desks?
And if we go further back; what about the time before computers?
You know all those jokes about the water cooler?
People talked to one another. Face to face. Really. It happened. I’m a witness.
Never in all recorded history have people ever found it difficult to waste time at the office.
I get the impression from watching movies made in the 40s and 50s that people used to drink a lot at work. I don’t know if this is true or not, but in every old movie involving an ad agency or newsroom or corporate office, the Scotch is always flowing like water.
You know all those pages of jokes you get in e-mail? Similar stuff was around at least as far back as the 1960’s – my dad and aunt often showed me humorous pieces that had been run off on the mimeograph machine, typed and distributed via carbon paper, or copied on the Xerox machine.
My dad, who was a music teacher, also ran a football (NFL) pool at the schools where he worked.
Yeah, I know about that and it actually does still happen 
Hence I worded the question: did you guys work the whole time you were at your desks?
ETA: Argent Tower’s and Sternvogel’s answers weren’t there when I began typing. Good answers!
I have the feeling that there were a lot more pencils hanging from the ceiling in the days before the internet.
Smoking indoors and patting secretaries on the rear.
During the ten years I worked at two office jobs back in the early 90s, I wrote several novels’ worth of stories in just about every genre. One of these eventually turned into an online serial once I discovered AOL and the online world.
During the stock market crash in '87 we had a “fantasy stock market” game, which assumed you could buy and sell stocks at the prices listed in that morning’s newspaper.
I worked in a corporate environment when computers first hit the desk top. Believe it or not they were universally resisted, at least where I was. Many a meeting explaining the way of the future. How we would all go paperless and have realtime feed back. This was a manufacturing plant and I was a manager.
As far as paperless goes, I wish I would have bought stock in paper companies because the paper usage increased about 4 fold.
As far as productivity goes, we used to just talk to the person we needed to work with to get things done. Go see the plant manager or production foreman and have a few words and on to the next thing. The computers actually increased workload, because someone needed to input the data for the reports to be generated, which raised questions, which had to be addressed by e-mail. Many an e-mail storm ensued. We became slaves to the desktop machine and, seriously, e-mailed people sitting in offices next to ours without talking to them.
Of course the e-mails got copied to everyone who may have even remotely needed to know and what used to get resolved quickly between the 2 or 3 people responsible now took days or weeks of chatter and eventually would result in a meeting.
The company grew to 3 times the number of people, still doing the same basic manufacturing. The plant crew did not grow but the office staff needed to produce the reports and resolve the issues created by the new data and the endless meetings was at least double.
What I am getting at is that the new PC s created so much work in the begining that there was hardly time to do the actual day to day work.
Eventually we learned to go back to the few people we needed to talk to and stay off the e-mail. And of course the monthly reports looked a lot better with the new technology.
As to what we did before those computers started all that, well we weren’t chained to our desk waiting to respond to the electronics. I was able to spend more productive time in the plant actually talking to the operators about what the problems were without worrying if there was some report or email I needed to respond to. And yes, I guess we all spent more time talking to each other. It kept the walls down between labor and management.
I not a Luddite. But you are sitting at your desk bored and on the internet, because you shouldn’t leave the desk. That’s sad or bad. I’m not sure which. When I left that sort of work the managers were all chained to their Blackberries day and night.
Great answer ghardester! Thank you!
Ah, the good old days…now we just have to inject vodka into watermelon…wait, did I say that?
Stranger
I think computers have made it easier for people to waste time. I have computerized many offices and what people fail to understand is, computers aren’t made to save you time, they are designed to make you more efficent. If they were time saving we’d be working 32 hour weeks by now.
But before the days of computers many offices were filled with people doing busy work. Filing could be an entire job. Now computers can direct you to appropriate places to store things.
When I worked in a hotel in the early 80s everything was manual. EVERY single phone call a guest made came back. As soon as the guest hung up an operator would call us "This is quote service operater #123, Room 221 had a charge at 555-1212, 35¢, for 4 minutes. Thank you and she’d hang up. And it was fast, you’d better have your board ready to record that and write each charge on a person’s bill.
Credit cards EVERY single card had to be looked up in a book (updated every two weeks) If the card wasn’t in the book it was OK.
So life wasn’t harder but it was filled with “busy work” that didn’t leave a lot of time for extra activities. When it slowed down we’d do sales letters. We had to type each one out every single time. And no cross overs or white out. Again it’s not hard but it’s just extra time for busy work.
That said, things like the phone did settle down, becauses business didn’t use nor did customers expect places to be open late or on Sundays. I remember working overnights in an ER in 1981 (I was the reception operater) and we all were like, "I can’t believe we live in Chicago the 2nd biggest city (it was back then) in the USA and we can’t get something to eat at 2am other than Denny’s.
Markxxx, that makes a lot of sense!
And boy am I glad I’m not living in the “good old days”
And they seemed to always keep the bottle of scotch in the bottom drawer of their desk.
There was a cartoon, split panel, captioned “Computer Progress”. On the left was a guy at his desk, cards set out in front of him, sub-caption “Number of games of solitaire played per hour in 1977: 3”. On the right was a guy at a computer, sub-captioned “Number of games of solitaire played per hour in 1997: 457”.
I’m paraphrasing and describing a cartoon, but I can’t think of another way to drain the humor out of the thing. Perhaps if I explained the joke?
Anyway, pretty insightful, and bolsters the upthread notion of increased “efficiency.”
My first job working in an office environment was about 45 years ago, with an Australian government agency. One thing that took up a lot of some people’s time was going through the daily newspaper, e.g., completely solving that day’s cryptic crossword.
And, while computers have creating a lot of time-wasting stuff, they’ve also saved a lot of time. One of the things that I did on that job was some what-if statistical calculations: taking an existing time series, and playing around with it, using pencil and paper. That’s the sort of thing that you can do in a small fraction of the time these days, using a spreadsheet.
Another cartoon showed an office worker on the phone saying, “the computers are down so we have to do everything manually.” Everyone in the office has a deck of cards and is dealing solitaire hands.
Brilliant! Thank you 
