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?

    • lando55@lemmy.zip
      2·
      52 minutes ago

      Yes! Bonus points if your areas of interest align with your job, you may be able to get your company to foot the bill

  • ITGuyLevi@programming.dev
    1·
    1 hour ago

    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.

  • /home/pineapplelover@lemmy.dbzer0.com
    3·
    3 hours ago

    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”.

  • Twongo [she/her]@lemmy.ml
    4·
    6 hours ago

    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

  • Tomtits@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
    1·
    4 hours ago

    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.

  • Kissaki@feddit.orgEnglish
    4·
    8 hours 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.

  • darklamer@lemmy.dbzer0.com
    4·
    14 hours ago

    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).