So, work now blocks the Steam website...

Sounds familiar to me too. I skipped a lecture to get to a Real Ale festival before the queues formed, found the lecturer in the festival.

2 words: Self. Control. There's no substitute for it, and when you do try and substitute it, you end up becoming a weaker person for it that will more easily fall for marketing hype or a crap deal, and further become a creature of impulse in general.

As for the friend buying stuff for you - you'd need to go out for a break to call them to get them to do this for you, which really would cut in to your work time and would be a fucking pain to have to do.

+

tell them what games to get and a percent it'd be worth it. if you spend so much time here people you know are probably doing the same anyway. but do you know anybody well enough for that?

You're comparing some stats from your router, in your company, concerning time spent on all the various sites you consider "off task", to someone who might see a game on Steam they've been eyeing for a while already on sale, and mulling over buying it or not (which can be done at the same time as work). What a wonderfully useless comparison.

Opening the Steam site, looking what sales there are, and how much time is left on those sales, all takes no more than a minute or two, tops. As I already said, you can consider buying a game or not as you're doing actual work, after you check the site. That's not comparable to actually interacting with a web site, like reading personal email, looking at funny cat pictures or youtube videos, etc.

Then there's the issue of whether or not you should allow people at work, especially in an office, to do "off task" stuff to begin with. Logic would dictate that the best option is a resounding "no", as the more time spent on work, the more productivity it would seem. But studies show that that's not true. When people are doing stressful, effort-intensive work that takes a lot of thought (IT work for example), having a minor distraction present frees the mind up and relaxes temporarily, changing brain chemistry and allowing a shift of focus for a moment, which actually helps you remain on-track for much longer than someone who's constantly trying to wrap their head around one thing. Our brains are wired to look for new input all the time, not stagnate on one thing - the mind gets bored and wanders, or goes in to an auto pilot mode as it seeks new input. Also, when people are working in a relaxed way, and are allowed to spend a couple of minutes each hour doing "off task" stuff, their productivity increases. Especially towards the end of a work day. This is especially true when talking about people with somewhat of a higher intelligence - they seek multiple things to focus on much faster.

Of course, you do need people who a) have a good work ethic and thus b) actually want to do the work, along with providing clear oversight of work load and expected results (something a lot of companies fail at miserably anyway), all three of which take good management and staffing (which most companies also aren't exactly stellar in) to avoid them falling in to getting constantly distracted and spending too much time on these off task things.

As sales last no less than four hours (maybe it was even six, I forget which it was for flash sales), if you wanted to see all the sales, you'd have to check Steam no more than once every four (or six) hours.

There's no way that that would cause significant lost productivity.

what if you disable steamguard temporally for the time you're at work during the summer sale?

Are you using an android phone? Because I'm getting this exact same issue, and it annoys me to no end.

I don't understand. You don't have an iPhone?!