@RobinPenguins
Hmm, a lot of that is choice though. I don’t find I fritter away time chatting and making cups of tea as you describe. I talk to colleagues about non-work related stuff, but not to the detriment of productivity.
It's choice up to a point. In practice if people come up to you and strike up a conversation there's a limit to the amount of times you can cut them dead.
If you're in the office its much easier for people to interrupt you to ask you about things which are frankly not massively important while you're trying to get on with something else.
If someone sends me an email about something related to the Christmas party I can park it and look at it after hours. In the office that same person will wander over to my desk, ask me to look at my calendar and then go on to ask me what I'm wearing and how I'm getting there.
There's also I find a huge amount of questions in organisations which are directed at the wrong person. Four or five times a day someone will ask me about something which I have no knowledge of whatsoever. It's easy via email to say "nope, sorry, ask xxx". In an office, again, this become a preamble for a chat about something else.
In themselves these interactions are all fairly short but they all add up.
And in practice it's quite difficult to cut all of that off and say you have work to do without getting a reputation for being aloof and rude.