If you’re reading this at work, you might be cyberslacking, especially if you found out about this story through a link on a social media site (I promoted it on Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter).

Amnet Inc., a Colorado Springs information technology contractor for small business, monitored Internet activity for one of its clients over a two-day period last month and found the average employee visited Facebook 4.16 times, Online travel sites Kayak and Travelocity 3.45 times, YouTube 2.84 times and Netflix 1.16 times. Amnet did not identify the company, but said it peak times for personal online visits for its nearly 100 employees were 8-9:30 a.m., 11:30 a.m.-1 p.m. and 3:30-4 p.m.

“It’s not something most small businesses are concerned about, but they should be,” said Trevor Dierdorff, Amnet’s founder and CEO. “It is another way to watch your bottom line by keeping people productive. If you are losing one-third of their work time to cyberslacking and you have 12 employees, that means you could do the same work with eight employees if that productivity isn’t lost. If you can can reduce or eliminate the productivity drain, you would be able to save a ton on payroll.”

Dierdorff defines cyberslacking as using an employer’s Internet connection during working hours for activities that are not work related. He said only about 20 percent to 25 percent of his company’s 75 clients are concerned about lost productivity resulting from time spent online at work that has no work purpose. Most small businesses, he said, don’t have the tools to monitor or restrict what their employees do with their work computers, which can include not just social media sites but also pornography.

Amnet offers a service to its clients for $200 a month to block certain sites altogether, such as pornography, and restrict usage of other sites to just those that need to access such sites for their jobs or prevent visits to social media and other sites to before and after working hours. Other vendors offer similar services.

How widespread is the problem? RescueTime, a Seattle-based company that produces software to tracks how people spend time on their computers, found that Google’s Pac-Man game in May resulted in the loss of nearly 5 million hours of productivity at a cost of $120 million. A June 2010  survey by digital marketing information company  comScore Inc.  last year found that 56 million Americans, or about 40 percent of all workers,  spent at least 15 minutes a day while at work on social networking sites.

Please resume working; your boss will appreciate it.