Time tracking blog

Oooooo baby!  Can you feel that?  Do you smell that?  Do you FEEL that?  It’s football time baby!  Whether you’re a fully-fledged Monday morning quarterback, or just the casual observer, there’s no doubt about it, Football season is well underway, and a hallmark of Americana.

While there’s a vast majority of folks who are perfectly content watching a game or two on Sunday with the occasional Monday night game, there’s also another breed that get up early on Saturday morning to do all the weekend chores (maybe this might be your ‘get up early’ motivation that Jared was talking about), and line up Saturday afternoon to scout potential NFL great via the college ball lineup, spend most of Sunday analyzing quarterback pass and rushing percentages, and start watching the clock around 4pm on Mondays in anticipation for the last juice of football for the week via Monday Night Football.  And then there are the fantasy football players.

While I personally am not an active participant in fantasy football, I do assist a few of my buddies in stat collection, player ranking, overall performance statistics, etc.  99.44% of this is on my own time, but I have been known to head on over to ESPN around midmorning on Thursdays to double check the lineup for the coming weekend.  And there you have it.  I said it.  I spent company time, looking into football.

If you consider the $9.2 billion loss that Challenger, Gray and Christmas are predicting, Fantasy Football seems to be a downright crime.  It’s all too easy to find similar reports around the net that fantasy football costs employers lost productivity and un-focused workers that spend hours each week either physically doing, or at least thinking about their fantasy football teams over the 17 week period.

Now where did I put that Red flag – I want a Coach’s Challenge and review on this one.

Luckily armchair warriors, I’m here today to provide you with a bit of armor against such BS.  CC Holland of bnet.com thinks the same way I do, and ran a nice article about fantasy football NOT contributing to lost productivity.  CC Holland is a personal favorite of mine, and she’s written for the LA Times, the San Francisco Chronicle, Law.com, ZDNet, Cnet, and the list goes on.  In other words, this is a voice of authority.

We both agree that Fantasy Football not only does NOT contribute to lost productivity, but rather contributes to overall office comradery, AND includes the positive benefit of “Take a short break, do something else, and then come back and tackle this task with a fresh set of eyes and mind”.

Tom Van Riper at Forbes puts it in a slightly different light:

Clearly no employees ever engaged in any downtime on the job prior to the days of the Internet and fantasy sports. How managers must long for the days when no workers ate lunch, used the restroom, chatted around the water cooler or ran an errand during a typical eight-hour day.

On the opposite end of the spectrum, and probably the one most of us can relate to, a guy named Bentley posts to the Football Guys Forums:

The problem with a study like this is that they assume that people would spend their time doing something productive if there wasn’t fantasy football. It’s been my experience that people inclined to #&$* off are going to #&$* off.

So in summation dear fans of the gridiron, I’m not going to encourage you to spend hours and hours of company time pouring over QB stats and figuring out your starting lineup (that’s what commute times are for), but also, don’t feel guilty for the occasional “Man, we’re getting nowhere with this.  Let’s take 5,” and go give your fantasy team(s) a check.  Who knows, perhaps Bill from accounting just got a whole new take on the budget projections given that Brady is out for the season, and Green Bay sans Favre is still leading the charge in the NFC North.