Whistle while you 'wilf' online

Survey says employees waste two days per month surfing the Internet at work.

By Tom Regan

from the April 18, 2007 edition

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Sooner or later, someone was bound to give it a name. Its official description is "irrelevant Web browsing." But henceforth, it shall be known as "wilfing," and apparently people are wasting two days a month at work doing it.

At least that's the word from a new poll by YouGov, a British polling firm. After extrapolating results of a survey of more than 2,400 British adults, it determined that two-thirds of Britain's 33.7 million Internet users waste time surfing online at work and at home. And one-quarter of those time wasters spend as much as 33 percent of their time doing it.

There's a generation gap, too – those aged 25 and under were three times as likely to wilf away the hours as those over 55.

Wilf stands for "What was I looking for?" – as in "I went online to look up stock prices for the boss but found this really funny story at the Onion.com. And did you see that editorial at the Monitor site about Iraq? And then there was a super deal on iPods at apple.com, and I had to buy a few tunes when I was there … ah, hmmm, what was I looking for?"

Now, if you are primarily concerned about accuracy, this time-wasting term would actually be "wwilf," or maybe because it's the on the Web, you might use "wwwilf."

But in keeping with the way the current Net generation abbreviates phrases into letter lingo, "wilfing" it is.

Men are the worst offenders. The survey found that many visit (ahem) adult entertainment websites, which, I'm sorry to say, comes as little surprise. Apparently wilfing around adult sites creates some problems. One-third of the men who had been wilfing around on adult sites said it had damaged their relationship with their partners. (Again, one is tempted to say, "Well, duh.")

Yet the poll also shows that shopping sites provide the greatest distractions. Jason Lloyd of moneysupermarket.com told Reuters that there is just too much for workers to do online for them to stay focused on what they were doing. (His price comparison website sponsored the YouGov survey.)

Dave Weinberger, an Internet blogging pioneer who writes Joho the Blog and is responsible for much wilfing on his own, says that while he's never heard it called "wilfing" before, it's nothing new for the Internet – and maybe not such a bad thing. [Editor's note: The original version misspelled Dave Weinberger's last name.]

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