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?
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 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.
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
If I’m really bored I do actual work.
I check other job listing.
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.)
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!
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.
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
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.
I’ve spent a lot of time ruminating on the state of society and mourning the loss of better days.
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.
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
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
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!
Lmao
deleted by creator
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
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 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.
