Behind my desk, not very much of my day is spent working, pretty much every week.
Despite what my rather overambitious colleague may think, we’re far from overworked. I was quite happy at first I have a job that pays more than other jobs while demanding less, but I’m getting quite bored now.
I’ve worked here while a student, then as a temp and now full time, seems like I’ve working less and getting paid more as I go along 
When I first started at my current job, I worked pretty much the entire 7.5 hours. There was a lot of backed up data that needed to get entered and the office was a mess. I had very few breaks from data-entering and office-straightening. But then, one day about a month ago, that all changed. I was getting almost no work, maybe an hour a day. And it’s been like that for a month, except for a few days when I had to run around and get stuff from the lab. It gets a little boring, and I feel so helpless when other people are working and I’m not, but I don’t have the training yet to do what they’re doing, so I can’t help them with it. (Conversely, my work on my second novel has shot way up–I’ve added 5000 words to it this week alone. Thank god they let me work on it at work, unlike my last job where if you ran out of work you had to stare into space because they wouldn’t even let you take books or notebooks into the office.) Hell, I didn’t even go in today, and I’m not going in all of next week, because there’s nothing for me to do. I’m still getting paid too.
I feel kind of guilty about it. Every other job I’ve had has been nonstop, though. And this is also the first job I’ve had with Internet access. So maybe I’m due.
It depends for me.
I have days (today is a classic example) where I have not one task that requires my attention and I will probably actually only work half an hour at most today. My boss is working from home today (in view of the truly dreadful weather and the Sabbath which requires him to be home by about 3:30 today anyway), all my ongoing tasks are either complete or stalled out in a fashion I have no control over (primarily waiting for others to get back to me), and my desk is blessedly clear of things for me to attend to.
I also have days when I get in to find a pile of work on my desk and leave a pile of similar dimension (if totally different composition) for the lady who takes over for me at the end of my day (5:15), without a moment of downtime to be had.
But then I work as a legal assistant for a senior tax attorney at a very large corporate law firm, and my workload is directly dictated by the whim and fancy of my boss and only my boss. Part of what I get paid for is to be ready in case my boss needs me - sometimes he doesn’t. Sometimes I get ahead of him - finish tasks faster than he gets to the point where he needs me to shift to something else. I also take care of a lot of things that he absolutely needs to have done, but has no idea how to go about doing himself (client billing, conflicts checking, scheduling, pestering first-year associates to get their damn research done, etc.) and have vastly better computer skills than he does (so when he manages to break a document - or his computer - which happens an average of twice a month, I can fix it).
So really, the amount of time I spend at work but not actually working varies widely - and is built into my job description. The firm I work for knows full well that I’ll have moments when I’m not doing a damn thing but surfing the net and playing games. They don’t care. For every day like today, when I’ll spend 6.5 of my 7 hours of working time (why, yes, I do get a one-hour paid lunch) doing absolutely nothing, there are days when I run through 12 hours of work in 7 and spend my day putting out fires and keeping my boss from spreading his special brand of crazy. The bottom line is that in my particular position, as long as my boss is satisfied with my work, I could probably spend half my day every day on the clock pole-dancing with a Carmen Miranda hat and a donkey and nobody would care much.
Having some free time isn’t necessarily a bad thing. I’ve seen people enter a bunch of numbers into an Excel spreadsheet, total the numbers on a calculator, and then enter the total. There is no doubt they are hard workers; busy, busy, busy…. but are they really earning their pay? (They are too busy to take any time to really learn how to use the software.)
I think a little bit of ‘laziness’ is a good thing, if it triggers you to seek out more efficient ways of doing things. Being busy all the time, with no time to think and reflect is not a good thing. Especially in a white collar job, where it’s results that you are really being paid for, not effort.
The last office temp job I had I only worked, on average, about 50% of the time. Initially it was even less, but I started going around the department asking for extra projects to work on because I was so bored. Even with that, I still spent an awful lot of time figuring out ways to waste time. The worst part was that my cubicle was right next to the boss’s office, and was set up in a way so that everyone walking past me could see exactly what was on my computer screen – in other words, no net surfing for me. I spent a lot of the time reading the Microsoft Excel Instruction Book. I got a whole hour for lunch, and after a while I started to extend it a bit to see if anyone would notice. Nobody ever did. (When I left I was complimented by everyone for how hard working I was.) And for this I got paid time and a half what I make at my retail job, where I don’t even get a proper lunch break, but have to eat between serving customers.
When governments measure productivity, is this the kind of thing they’re measuring?
True, but that’s a big “if” in that first sentence. People spending hours surfing the web at work aren’t necessarily reflecting on their job or coming up with new, more efficient ways to do things.