this post was submitted on 22 Oct 2025
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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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[–] s3rvant@lemmy.ml 14 points 1 day ago (1 children)

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.

[–] victorz@lemmy.world 1 points 1 day ago (1 children)

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 2 points 1 day ago (1 children)

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.

[–] victorz@lemmy.world 1 points 1 day ago (1 children)

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 points 19 hours ago (1 children)

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.

[–] victorz@lemmy.world 1 points 8 hours ago (1 children)

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. 🤷‍♂️

[–] Eheran@lemmy.world 1 points 1 hour ago* (last edited 1 hour ago) (1 children)

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.

[–] victorz@lemmy.world 1 points 1 hour ago

What kind of work do you do that it is so easy to see what and how much someone actually does?

Pick any freaking job lol.

  1. Carpenter — you're not delivering anything... carpented. Carpened. I dunno.
  2. Nurse — you're not pulling your weight; the other nurses will notice immediately (I know second hand).
  3. Software engineering in a team — people will notice you're not creating any pull requests, e.g. Or saying the same bullshit every single morning at standup.
  4. Cleaning — the clients you're supposed to be cleaning for will complain to your manager somehow that the shit ain't cleaned properly.
  5. Fishing — coming home with empty buckets: "wtf you doing out there, son?"

Like, pick a profession. If you're not producing or providing the service, people should notice. Otherwise it's poorly run, IMO.

What do you do for work? That's really starting to intrigue me.