Strung out: Les Paul Google doodlers waste 5.35m hours of productivity

How much strumming on company time did you contribute to the 5.35m hours in lost productivity via the Les  Paul Google doodle?

Employers are said to be strung out after workers became obsessed with the doodle on Google’s landing page which allowed users to strum the strings or trigger notes with the letters or numbers on their keyboards.

The tribute to the American jazz and country guitarist, aka Lester Polsfuss, became the most popular doodle of all-time on the monster search engine site in recent weeks but it was business owners who lost out to the tune of US$133,769,725 according to time management software company RescueTime.

The closest doodle to get within a beat of the Les Paul doodle was last year’s playable Pac-Man doodle.

According to RescueTime, Google’s Les Paul doodle consumed an additional 5,350,789 hours of time versus the 4,819,352 hours consumed by the Pac-Man doodle.

“When Google released the Les Paul doodle, the average user spent 26 seconds MORE on Google.com than in previous time periods. On average, users spent 36 more seconds on last year’s Pac-Man doodle, so you would think that the Les Paul doodle had less impact," the company said.

“Wrong. According to Wolfram Alpha and Alexa, Google’s daily unique visitor count is up to 740m versus the 505m last year.”

The geniuses behind the innovative doodle are said to be hitting all the right chords at Google HQ.