Last Friday Google added a mini-version of the classic Pac-Man game on its home page in honor of its 30th anniversary. A productivity firm calculated that time spent playing Pac-Man on Friday cost firms 4.8 million hours of productivity.

According to Kotaku “RescueTime, makers of productivity tracking and optimization software, looked at the average time that 11,000 of its users spent on Google’s pages on Friday and found it more than quadrupled. Normally they spend 11 seconds on a Google page, but on Friday they spent 45.” Usually the time spent on Google’s main page is so low because people search for something which exits the page quickly.

Google also had more than 500 million pageviews on Friday. RescueTime, assuming its user base was representative, ran some numbers and came up with:

• 4,819,352 hours of time lost (This is above the 33.6 million man hours of attention Google gets on a regular day)

• More than $120 million in lost productivity, assuming the cost of the average Google user is $25 an hour (pay + benefits)

• According to RescueTime, “For that same cost, you could hire all 19,835 Google employees, from Larry and Sergey down to their janitors, and get 6 weeks of their time.”

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