I was reading my ESPN the magazine and I ran across a segment by the Chicago outplacement firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas. They did a little segment that many people in the cubicle world has heard that March Madness results in billions of lost productivity.

I hear this all the time and that the first week when people are making their brackets and when they are busted up in round one is where so much time is lost. Then the attention tends to die down but the damage has been done. Millions of hours gone to the love of March Madness.

See, Challenger Gray Christmas can put a dollar value not by using polls but by gathering statistics on productivity, average salaries, and an estimate of time to come up with a guess. It's not exactly rocket science but this is a general snippet of what was lost in a week. Continue reading →