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?
Im here. Hello. Currently working.
Browsing lemmy and watching TV shows / youtube.
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.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
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
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.
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
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 often bring a sewing project to work.
Patchwork just like my software projects.
- see if there’s literally anything else you can do to improve or polish what you just worked on
- set if there’s anyone else that might need help with their work or who you can mentor
- learn new things you can put on your resume it that will help you in your job
- learn stuff in general that isn’t directly work related, but maybe related to your next job/what you would like to work with
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.
Once I ended up in a situation where I was required to be present in the office but didn’t actually have any tasks to perform (all work on our project had been halted by some patent lawsuit).
So I simply talked to my manager and asked if it’d be OK if I used the time I had to sit there with nothing to do to work on open source projects and after some initial confusion he agreed to this so that’s how I then spent my working days (until the work they actually paid me for eventually got going again).
By doom scrolling on Lemmy and Reddit.
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
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.
