SLEEPY CYBERLOAFERS

The less sleep people get, the more likely they are to "cyberloaf," surfing entertainment websites instead of focusing.
Consulting Google search logs, researchers looked at searches for "YouTube" and other sites on the Monday after the clock leaped forward (a time when people are at work with, on average, 40 fewer minutes of sleep than usual). They analyzed data from more than 200 American cities, from 2004 to 2009. Entertainment-related searches were 3.1% higher on the post-timeshift Monday than on the preceding one, and 6.4% higher than on the following Monday. Similarly, 100 students were told to closely evaluate an online lecture, having worn a sleep-monitoring device the night before. Their surfing was quietly recorded. An hour of disrupted sleep was found to predict that a student would be surfing during 20% of the task.

"Lost Sleep and Cyberloafing: Evidence From the Laboratory and a Daylight Saving Time Quasi-Experiment," David T. Wagner, Christopher M. Barnes, Vivien K.G. Lim, and D. Lance Ferris, Journal of Applied Psychology (forthcoming)