I frequently have all of my work completed, and I am unfortunately not allowed to work from home. This means I spend a lot of time sitting at my desk scrolling social media, because there’s nothing that needs done. I feel like I’m wasting my time, even more than work already wasted the best hours of the day. How do you fill that downtime with something that is personally valuable, but not disruptive or noticeable enough that you’d get in trouble?
I wrote a book. Always looked busy. Was great!
Highly recommend this. (My book is shit, and will never see the light of day, but I had so much fun writing it.)
Haha same, but I had fun and learned a whole lot about the effort that goes into it. Had a newfound respect for everything I read after.
Never think of your writing like that. Remember that both Twilight saga and 50 shades of grey exists as best sellers. Your writing is clearly better than that (just from this post!).
Consider something like Smashwords, or even sticking it on Amazon for free/cheap. You may not be the next Tolkien, but you worked on the book, let people read it!
What’s your book genre and about?
Depending on how much of an asshole your company is, they probably have the rights to your book because you did it on company time
Do online courses in areas of your interest.
Yes! Bonus points if your areas of interest align with your job, you may be able to get your company to foot the bill
deleted by creator
Would you be able to create even more work for yourself and get paid more for doing it? Like suggesting things to be done, or doing side projects?
This was me. At first I automated some commonly used spreadsheets and then made some simple web tools to help our team which eventually led to getting to their IT department and now I work from home full time as a developer.
From home full time is the dream. I’m at home Thu–Fri.
But yeah, very good! Showing what you can do will get you ahead and not be bored!
Will it get you ahead tho? Or only under very certain conditions? The last times(!) I have seen people going beyond it was essentially treated like that is to be expected. I have never seen that pay off to anyone. But you know what “always” pays off? Showing you boss you are busy. Just making that impression, not necessarily doing much.
If you are at a company and nobody notices you are doing nothing but “looking busy”, and that doesn’t get you in trouble eventually, you don’t want to be at that company. What the fuck is that, dude. You should be in a place of collaboration where people notice you, and notice if something is off. Otherwise the place is very clearly poorly run. Get out of there.
How many bosses are there that genuinely look at how efficient someone was based on objective data instead of going by gut feeling? How to even define efficient or any other metric? Way too complicated.
The boss doesn’t need to. If you are working with people, and you collaborate and talk about what you’re doing every day, you’ll quickly notice when someone isn’t doing shit. This will bubble up to the relevant manager and boss and they would have a talk with you to mitigate this behavior. No success? You’re out.
Not complicated in the least, if you have the proper team structure and communication routines. 🤷♂️
What kind of work do you do that it is so easy to see what and how much someone actually does?
For me, a new job could be a few hours or several days and I only truly know that when it is done and no further complications can pop up. For someone else doing the same thing, it could be the opposite (easy/fast vs slow/hard). Or it all hinges on one singular idea to solve some issue, so it could literally be a month without real progress and then it is solved within an hour.
Lmao
deleted by creator
If I’m really bored I do actual work.
Mastubate in the toilet like every other sane person ?
We have just the one porta potty. It’s gonna be a challenging wank not just because of the nastiness but also because of the pressure from people lining up to use it
Skill issue
I mean I did say challenging and not impossible
I worked a factory job for several years that had nearly unrestricted internet and the ability to install programs. There’s a LOT of options here depending on your technical skill and what you’re able to get away with. One of my favs was setting up a remote connection to my home network so I could work on project there without much fuss on the work computers and was easy to just close the connection if needed.
Also games. I played a lot of games… even designed some with all the time we had.
Learning web development was my most productive though; I was able to contribute to the company and got promoted to IT which launched my career to where I am now.
Browsing lemmy and watching TV shows / youtube.
Learn how to code
Watch out for potential troublemaking coworkers who think youre hacking.
Or the ones who think you’re trying to make everyone redundant. I’ve worked on scripts that have been shut down because a co worker thought it would make people lose their jobs so they complain to the boss.
As a dev, me too
There is always more documentation to update sadly.
There is always old customer data to remove. I am currently working on a plan to remove the vxlan and firewall sub interfaces for a customer that was lost 3 years ago.I have no downtime like that. Quite the contrary. I have too much work, too many responsibility, and want to fix and improve things that annoy me which adds more.
I do visit programming.dev, which is a distraction, but tangential in my field of work, sometimes directly useful.
Same. I work from clock in to clock out and don’t usually even have a second to check for messages on my phone from family.
I’m a nerd who plays and GMs tabletop RPGs with friends. I often use slack time at work to build out my campaigns and characters.
Your seeing it for me.
That and ebooks/royal road/audiobooks via phone. Just make it look kinda like work and you should be good.
Alternatively, try to learn something new. Theres a lot of online resources out there!
At a customer service job I’d read whole books in the browser. Just keep the window small and it looks pretty inconspicuous.
Now I work from home so I look at Lemmy and such on my phone.
I have a hard rule of never playing video games on the clock because that’s a slippery slope.
Nursing student / surgical tech here. I do a lot of my studying at work when I’m not scrubbed in to a surgery. All our text books are digital, so I can whip my phone out at any time to get some reading done, especially if I can pop a headphone in and use the text-to-speech features to listen to them - I’ll do that while I’m restocking supplies / pulling the next days cases / cleaning / checking for out-dates. Surgery schedule is always feast or famine, so when we’re not occupied with patient care there are a hundred other ways to keep busy - but most of those don’t really require thinking, so time for school.
Paying me to poop is also a fantastic use of my employer’s income. There’s a crazy correlation with the amount of busy work pushed on us vs the severity of constipation that shows up out of the blue. Sometimes it just takes a half hour to drop a log, ya know?? 🤷♂️
I write really dumb powershell scripts. One throws up a GUI with a picture of a wizard holding a magic 8-ball, clicking the 8-ball gives a random response from a list of responses. It was kind of fun figuring out how to store images in the script (just went with base64)…
Its always a fun way to guess if the meeting with M$ is going to be beneficial or not.
