Why close questions about Work Sampling, Slacking and Idle Times

Question

I don't understand why questions about idling at work gets closed as subjective, but other questions that also ask about how much time are spared.

However, from the management point of view, if the project deadlines have already been sacrificed, then how much of idling time can we attribute to the failure to deliver? How do managers measure and define the acceptable range? I think this is no different that those interview and job hoping questions, except one is in operations the other is in HR.

The question I wanted to ask, but is warned by the blue popup bubble that it "appers subjective and is likely to be closed", is:

What are the management tools that are/can be used you use to measure, quantify and benchmark to define an acceptable idle time and frequency of idling? e.g. 7.5 seconds on Farmville every 1 minute, versus 15 mins in the pantry for every 2 hours of work.

Is this a valid question?

I asked this question to Google but didn't get an answer, so I wrote a small application to measure the keyboard and mouse input idle time. At the end of one day, I personally clocked 45mins of idle time, while the worse performing member clocked 2:30 hours. Sure, this application is not perfect, people can still chat on Skype and surf SE like I am doing now, but I think this is a good start. With this result, I can quantify the quantify the acceptable range and I think this makes an appropriate answer for the above question.

Can I post the question on Workplace now?

Answer 1

How about instead asking for the problems associated with measuring time like this and how they can be abated? That would be on topic and constructive. You could even ask how to determine the acceptable range.

The question you are asking about the range is going to be opinion based. And most of those opinions are going to be that there is no way to actually quantify it. That is not going to help anyone.

Answer 2

On-topic off-topic at The Workplace is often an exercise in I know it when I see it. Older questions (like some of those you linked) would be less appropriate now, like many of the questions on Stack Overflow from 2008/2009 when it first started. Rather than focus on contrasting 6 different questions on very different topics, let's focus on your question.

From your explanation, I think there are three areas where you may run in to trouble:

1. Your question isn't clear
2. Your problem isn't clear
3. It may be read as asking how to do your job

Your Question Isn't Clear

You're asking two different questions:

from the management point of view, if the project deadlines have already been sacrificed, then how much of idling time can we attribute to the failure to deliver? How do managers measure and define the acceptable range?

One is asking for tools, one is asking where to assign blame (which the tools could be used to measure).

Your Problem Isn't Clear

As explained in our help center, "You should only ask practical, answerable questions based on actual problems that you face." Ideally your question will explain the problem, explain how you've tried to solve it and why it didn't work, and then let the experts in our community give you their answers based on that information.

If you can't define your question well, it may be because you still aren't clear on the problem. It sounds like the actual issue you're facing is that a project missed the deadline, people want to blame someone, as a result they want to monitor idle time and figure out if it's 'excessive'.

If that's the case, you may want to focus less on the tool you created, and more about explaining why you are focusing on measuring employee slack time after a project misses its deadline.

How Do I...

Depending on the problem, and the question asked, people may determine that this is more about how to do your job rather than a problem that involves the Workplace. Be sure that your question is about how to solve a general workplace issue, and isn't about, "How should I measure time spent idle?" which is going to be something that you and your company has to figure out.

We don't know what you'd end up asking, but I recommend taking the time to think about what the problem is, if the question scopes your problem well, and if it's clear that there are solutions that the community can provide and evaluate objectively that aren't just providing tool suggestions, etc.