How to fit three hours’ work into a busy day

Candidates should prove competent at tweeting throughout the day

(Getty Images)

A recent study of 2,000 office workers reveals a shocking fact: the average British worker carries out real, actual work for only three hours a day, and spends the rest of the time being distracted by chat, gossip, technology and social media.

Some will read this news and say, “Three hours – as much as that?” Some bosses will consider getting tough with their lead-swinging employees. And some will encourage the distractions, because they allegedly make the three-hour day more productive.

So how will job descriptions read in the future? “The successful candidate will begin work at 9am with a 20-minute inspection of their Twitter timeline, followed by a blueberry muffin and Americano in the canteen plus (optional) chat with Aaron from Bought Ledger about the hot girl playing the journalist in Borgen Season Three. The candidate should prove competent at tweeting NO FEWER THAN 26 times throughout the day without bitching about colleagues.

He or she will be expected to check out random-assault videos on YouTube and footage of cute kittens riding tricycles on twitpic. The candidate must display full familiarity with Instagram, Pinterest and the plot of Game of Thrones. He or she may also like to get some work done between 10.45am and 11.20am…”

Alice doesn’t live here any more, but surely someone else could

Alice Eve, the actress daughter of Trevor and last seen in Star Trek Into Darkness, is a charming woman, but risks alienating fans with her recent remarks about property.

She owns a flat in west London and really misses it, because she’s never there. She lives in Hollywood, you see. The flat, she says, is “my gorgeous, cute, little first home and now it just sits there, abandoned. It makes me sad.” But she can’t contemplate selling it either, because “there’s too much sentimental value”.

I wonder if there are any would-be flat owners out there who’d love to have Ms Eve’s fashionable address, so they could go round and make her cute little flat feel so much less abandoned by moving in without delay?