Employees waste a lot more time at work than most people imagine. We also work too many hours.

These two statements at first seem at odds with each other. But when you really think about it, both can be true at the same time. There's no reason a person can't waste a chunk of time in the morning shopping online, then spend precious evening hours answering work-related e-mail.

Two recent surveys show it probably happens more than we think.

On the time-wasting front, AOL and Salary.com surveyed 10,044 workers and found the average employee admits to frittering away 2.09 hours per day, not counting lunch. Two hours a day! That's far more time than employers expect to go down the drain, the companies say. And it's costly: Employers spend $759 billion each year on salaries for which companies receive no apparent benefit, according to AOL and Salary.com.

So what exactly are we doing when we're not working? The top time-wasting activity cited by 44.7% of respondents is personal Internet use, such as e-mail, IM, online polls, interactive games, message boards and chat rooms. The No. 2 offender is socializing with coworkers (23.4%), followed by conducting personal business (6.8%), spacing out (3.9%) and running errands off-premises (3.1%).

Granted, employers don't expect workers to go non-stop eight hours a day. In a follow-up survey of corporate human resource managers, AOL and Salary.com found employers expect the average employee to waste about an hour per day, in addition to the worker's lunch hour.

Plus, in some cases "wasted time might be considered 'creative waste' -- time that may well have a positive impact on the company's culture, work environment, and even business results," said Bill Coleman, senior vice president at Salary.com, in a statement. "Personal Internet use and casual office conversations often turn into new business ideas or suggestions for gaining operating efficiencies."

So why do we waste time? That top excuses of survey respondents are:

* Not enough work to do: 33.2%
* Underpaid for amount of work I do: 23.4%
* Co-workers distract me: 14.7%
* Not enough evening or weekend time: 12.0%

Meanwhile, on the other side of the fence, many of us are overworked.

According to a study released by staffing services firm OfficeTeam, employees will be working longer hours in the next decade or so, thanks to increasingly available technologies that let people work anywhere, anytime. OfficeTeam polled workplace and technology experts as well as workers and executives at the 1,000 largest companies in the U.S. for its study, "Office of the Future: 2020."

About 42% of executives said they believe employees will be working more hours in the next 10 to 15 years. Just 9% said they would be working fewer hours. Even vacation is no guaranteed respite from work: 86% of executives surveyed said workers will be more connected to the office while on vacation in the future.

Just one other tidbit… along with predicting the types of software and wireless devices that will change the way we work, OfficeTeam speculates about how our workspaces will differ in the office of the future: "By the year 2020, offices are expected to be embedded with sensors or "motes" that monitor and maintain the environment -- including temperature, humidity and lighting -- and respond to users' needs."

As an example, the group suggests a chair-mounted sensor could detect tension in a person's body and signal the chair to give a back massage.

I wrote a story nearly eight years ago about such workplace innovations. Not the massaging chair, but the temperature, humidity and lighting sensors. I visited the Intelligent Workplace -- I think it was called the Office of the Future back then -- at Carnegie Mellon University and wrote about it for Architecture magazine.

At the time I eagerly soaked up the technologists' visions of individually controlled temperature and lighting sensors located at each employee's desk. But I've yet to see it implemented anywhere. How about you? Do you know of offices with individualized environmental controls? If so, I'd love to hear about it. Drop me a line at abednarz@nww.com