DST and daylight savings were trending Monday on Twitter, and the theme of many of the tweets had to do with workers’ difficulties adjusting to the time switcheroo.

“Ugh. It is seriously demoralizing to have to go to work in the dark again. Curse you, DST!” tweeted @woyce, a sentiment that summed up emotion about the day.

Many employees are feeling out of sorts and tired because the clocks have sprung ahead an hour, and that’s going to impact productivity; as witnessed by the plethora of workers spending time tweeting about their hatred of DST instead of working.

Making matters worse is the commencement of office pools this week for March Madness, the NCAA Men’s division basketball championship, that is also expected to be an employee time sink.

It’s the perfect storm of non-productivity.

A recent study by Penn State released found that daylight savings leads to more workers slacking off.

The time switch results in a loss of sleep and an uptick in web surfing, maintained D. Lance Ferris, assistant professor of management and organization and Penn State’s Smeal College of Business. Ferris, along with other researchers, looked at six years of Google data and found that tired employees are more apt to make bad decisions.

“Using existing data that shows that people exhibit poorer self-control when they're tired, the researchers said that the lost sleep due to the time change -- an average of 40 minutes that Sunday night -- makes employees less likely to self-regulate their behavior and more inclined to spend time cyberloafing, or surfing the Internet for personal pursuits while on the clock,” according to a Penn State report on the research.

March Madness will likely contribute to the problem. Outplacement firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas, Inc., predicted the basketball fever could attract more than 2.5 million visitors on the web per day, and each spending 90 minutes watching the games.

While John Challenger, chief executive officer of Challenger, said the slacking off wouldn’t bring the economy down, he did estimate it could cost employers about $175 million in the first two full days of the basketball tournament.

“Monday could be particularly dreadful on the productivity front,” he noted.

Beyond March Madness and DST, there may be a general falling off of worker efficiency going on the United States.

A Wall Street Journal story Monday reported that Northwestern University professor Robert Gordon has found the productivity spike in 2009  after mass layoffs that made employees fearful of losing their jobs has fallen off. He said there were “clear signs everywhere” that productivity has hit the skids.

So maybe, March Madness and DST are just great excuses to sit back and kick up our heels even more. 

Your friendly IT guys may not have a UNC-Duke-quality rivalry with March Madness, but they have the dates circled.

It happens in offices around the country, around this time of year.

There you are, squinting at your computer, pretending to be oh-so-immersed in that spreadsheet, but what you’re really doing is waiting for the boss to leave so you can get back to watching March Madness on the other screen.

But why won’t the game load?

Blame the IT department.

A new survey finds that about two-thirds of IT departments take some sort of action to block, ban or throttle non-work streaming content, including the March Madness college basketball tournament.

When it comes to March Madness specifically, four in 10 admit they monitor employees who try to access March Madness on their computers, in order to protect the company’s network.

That’s according to a survey of about 500 IT professionals conducted this February on behalf of Modis, an IT staffing firm that is part of Adecco.

Let’s be fair to the IT folks. They aren’t necessarily trying to keep you from keeping tabs on your bracket during the work day, but they are trying to keep your network running.

According to the Modis survey, four in 10 respondents said streaming content from the annual basketball tournament has had some impact on the company’s network, such as slowing or even shutting it down.

Most IT professionals surveyed said they block streaming content to make sure everyone can do their regular work without network disruptions. But the majority also said they do so to keep people from getting too distracted at work.

It’s not clear how much March Madness, which begins March 11, really distracts people from getting their work done.

Challenger, Gray and Christmas this year poked fun at its own assessment of how much game time takes away from company time, and even admitted no one’s likely going out of business because of a basketball tournament.

 The outplacement firm’s advice: As with most things, March Madness should be viewed in moderation. At least while you’re at work.

We are still coming down from the euphoria following Duke’s performance in Chapel Hill this weekend. But we are also eagerly awaiting filling out our brackets next Sunday.

Some bosses, however, would rather you stick to work during work hours.

OfficeTeam, a Silicon Valley-based temp firm, recently conducted a survey of 1,013 senior executives (whatever that means), and while 11 percent called the hoops hoopla “a welcome diversion,” 32 percent said “I am a soul-sapping killjoy that likes to talk about work-life balance only when HR is within earshot.” Oh, sorry, actually they checked the box next to “shouldn’t be allowed at work.”

Reasonable bosses, 57 percent of them, went with “I don’t encourage them, but they’re OK in moderation.” We imagine our boss (hi!) is in this group, but he probably would have preferred a subset that said “Until my bracket is busted, then I don’t want to hear anything about it.”

Go (insert team here that is not Duke)!