IStock Photo 11820658 © Chris Gramly

Finding ways to waste time at work is a time-honored tradition. Office March Madness betting pools for the NCAA basketball tournament are estimated to cost billions of dollars in lost productivity. And for many, downtime at work isn't seasonal—it’s a year-round avocation. So how much goofing off is going on?

Nearly all—1 in 1.08 (92.6%)—employed adults log on during work hours, and more than half—1 in 1.76 (56.8 %)—go to non-work-related websites at some point during the workday. This fact is hardly surprising. A 2007 survey conducted by Salary.com found that the average employee wasted "1.7 hours of a typical 8.5 hour working day." Much of that is spent on the Web. A 2006 study found that employees who accessed non-work-related websites on the job spent an average of 12.81 hours a week on the Web, 3.06 of which were unrelated to their job.

Most of that surfing was relatively innocuous. Some of the most common sites were devoted to news (1 in 1.25, 80%), weather (1 in 1.32, 75.8%), shopping (1 in 2.08), sports (1 in 3.33), and job search (1 in 3.85). And 1 in 8.33 employees admitted to having visited a pornography site at work in a year, though 95% claimed they stumbled upon it accidently.

Even if companies expect waste, they rarely look kindly on it, and email is particularly subject to scrutiny. The odds a company monitors employee emails are 1 in 2.33, and the odds a company has fired an employee for email misuse are 1 in 3.57.

So if you do wind up looking at something you know you shouldn't be looking at, at least make sure you don't email your coworkers about it.