How do you kill time at work?
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?
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I wrote a book. Always looked busy. Was great!
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
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
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
If I'm really bored I do actual work.
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.
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.
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.
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!
What i do: oomscroll Lemmy, take smoke breaks, do "the little stuff" like organizing documents after your lazy coworkers, take a walk, read books and hop on codeacademy. Still - this freedom gets stale quickly because the most stressful part becomes pretending to look busy
Any way you can learn new skills or get certs while you work? Take on a project to put on your resume? Help others? Hopefully, you will find something that challenges you or make work more appealing during your day?
Chess puzzles. Sometimes informational YouTube. There's not usually that much time though.
By doom scrolling on Lemmy and Reddit.
Im here. Hello. Currently working.
When I was still working in an office I used to listen to a lot of podcasts.
And audio books
Chess puzzles. Reading about my hobbies.
I've spent a lot of time ruminating on the state of society and mourning the loss of better days.
suduko?
You don't. I'd ask my lead/supervisor if there is any other item to work on. Doing this consistently will get you promoted.
I often bring a sewing project to work.
Patchwork just like my software projects.
I read wikipedia or fun books(novels) from zlib/annas. Also some lemmy and hn.
if you drop the file in word, it almost looks like you’re working
Sometimes I chat with coworkers. I work in IT so sometimes I go on a rabbithole of random computer stuff. Usually though, I don't have enough time to "kill".
I walk around the shop and bullshit with others, maybe clean or organize stuff. Or help build panels if I'm caught up on testing. We're so busy right now tho those days are kind of long gone. Currently working overtime indefinitely til like 2027 at least.
When I'm done I go home. Benefits of being self-employed.
This wasn't ever much of an issue in my previous job either. Work fills the time given for it. If there's literally nothing to do then I'd browse reddit/Lemmy or watch YouTube videos.
Do crosswords and puzzles to keep the ol' brain moist. The odd bit of doomscrolling as well of course.
I'm currently waiting for the line cleaner to work it's magic so am just sat in our site office.
There's no stock deliveries until tomorrow, it's too wet to paint (thanks Benjamin) so I'm relishing the quiet time before we go live tomorrow evening.
When I work in office settings I usually set pace based on what I need to accomplish, and use any extra time to do proper reviews of my work.
this was how I got my wow addiction back in 2005
Lately, Clash Royale
Art.
I check other job listing.
Richii mahjong phone app
I play chess on lichess and chess.com
Emulators, whether installed locally or played via an online version, are great too - replayed Ocarina of Time over night shift and was awesome for getting through that time
Research something non-work related (usually owls)
Plan a vacation or home project
Study music/theory/plugins/production or play on my mini keyboard
Make friends with other contractors outside of my company
Go out and enjoy the fall weather
Read an ebook or enjoy an audiobook. I started Discworld. I'm down 4 so far out of 41 I think it is.
Basically stuff I'd want to do anyway that requires little or no equipment. Down time is my time. The only thing that stinks is an open office with no real privacy. People don't seem to care, but it makes it less enjoyable for me. I've been here 2 years now and no one has ever said anything.
I was lucky enough to be able to keep working from home after the quarantines of 2020, but when I used to be in the office, I'd find a YouTube video, make it full screen, then on a second monitor I'd click and drag another window on top of it to obscure it. Then I'd hover over the taskbar to bring up the preview, and watch the video on that.
If anyone was passing by, I'd just have to move my mouse to get rid of the preview, and it looked like I was looking at important business stuff. Even if I didn't realize someone was getting close, the preview is pretty small, so they never noticed it, though it helped that I worked in an office full of computer-illiterate people.
I listen to podcasts or audiobooks, I often read from an eReader so from the outside can appear work related. But I also do a lot of origami so I don't know.
Read on kiwix. Browse the archive.
Playing games on my phone
Reading books