The term cyberloafing first emerged during the mid nineties among a proliferation of words created by productive use of the prefix cyber- to describe things relating to computers or the Internet, (e.g.: cybercafé, cyberspace). The word cyberslacking is a lexical variant, and if you’ve been a reader of this column for a number of years and are now getting a sense of déjà vu, then that might be because we first examined this concept cyberslacking. The verbs loaf and slack both refer to the action of spending time avoiding work, but interestingly, though the word slack is perhaps more widely used than loaf in a general context, cyberloafing seems to have overtaken cyberslacking in this specific scenario of avoiding work by spending time on the Web.

The term cyberloafing first emerged during the mid nineties among a proliferation of words created by productive use of the prefix cyber- to describe things relating to computers or the Internet, (e.g.: cybercafé, cyberspace). The word cyberslacking is a lexical variant, and if you’ve been a reader of this column for a number of years and are now getting a sense of déjà vu, then that might be because we first examined this concept cyberslacking. The verbs loaf and slack both refer to the action of spending time avoiding work, but interestingly, though the word slack is perhaps more widely used than loaf in a general context, cyberloafing seems to have overtaken cyberslacking in this specific scenario of avoiding work by spending time on the Web.