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?

  • Victor@lemmy.world
    16·
    1 day 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?

    • s3rvant@lemmy.mlEnglish
      14·
      1 day ago

      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.

      • Victor@lemmy.world
        32·
        1 day ago

        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!

        • Eheran@lemmy.world
          3·
          22 hours ago

          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.

          • Victor@lemmy.world
            1·
            19 hours ago

            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.

            • Eheran@lemmy.world
              1·
              11 hours ago

              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.

              • Victor@lemmy.world
                1·
                10 minutes ago

                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. 🤷‍♂️