I wrote a book. Always looked busy. Was great!
this post was submitted on 22 Oct 2025
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Highly recommend this. (My book is shit, and will never see the light of day, but I had so much fun writing 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.
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!
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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
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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?
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
Browsing lemmy and watching TV shows / youtube.
If I'm really bored I do actual work.
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
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.
I'm a nerd who plays and GMs tabletop RPGs with friends. I often use slack time at work to build out my campaigns and characters.
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.
Your seeing it for me.
That and ebooks/royal road/audiobooks via phone. Just make it look kinda like work and you should be good.
Alternatively, try to learn something new. Theres a lot of online resources out there!
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.
Nursing student / surgical tech here. I do a lot of my studying at work when I'm not scrubbed in to a surgery. All our text books are digital, so I can whip my phone out at any time to get some reading done, especially if I can pop a headphone in and use the text-to-speech features to listen to them - I'll do that while I'm restocking supplies / pulling the next days cases / cleaning / checking for out-dates. Surgery schedule is always feast or famine, so when we're not occupied with patient care there are a hundred other ways to keep busy - but most of those don't really require thinking, so time for school.
Paying me to poop is also a fantastic use of my employer's income. There's a crazy correlation with the amount of busy work pushed on us vs the severity of constipation that shows up out of the blue. Sometimes it just takes a half hour to drop a log, ya know?? 🤷♂️
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.
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).
Any way you can learn new skills or get certs while you work? Take on a project to put on your resume? Help others? Hopefully, you will find something that challenges you or make work more appealing during your day?
Chess puzzles. Sometimes informational YouTube. There's not usually that much time though.
Im here. Hello. Currently working.
I've spent a lot of time ruminating on the state of society and mourning the loss of better days.
By doom scrolling on Lemmy and Reddit.
When I was still working in an office I used to listen to a lot of podcasts.
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Chess puzzles. Reading about my hobbies.
suduko?
- 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
I often bring a sewing project to work.
Patchwork just like my software projects.
I read wikipedia or fun books(novels) from zlib/annas. Also some lemmy and hn.
if you drop the file in word, it almost looks like you’re working
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".
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.
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.
I check other job listing.
I was lucky enough to be able to keep working from home after the quarantines of 2020, but when I used to be in the office, I'd find a YouTube video, make it full screen, then on a second monitor I'd click and drag another window on top of it to obscure it. Then I'd hover over the taskbar to bring up the preview, and watch the video on that.
If anyone was passing by, I'd just have to move my mouse to get rid of the preview, and it looked like I was looking at important business stuff. Even if I didn't realize someone was getting close, the preview is pretty small, so they never noticed it, though it helped that I worked in an office full of computer-illiterate people.
Research something non-work related (usually owls)
Plan a vacation or home project
Study music/theory/plugins/production or play on my mini keyboard
Make friends with other contractors outside of my company
Go out and enjoy the fall weather
Read an ebook or enjoy an audiobook. I started Discworld. I'm down 4 so far out of 41 I think it is.
Basically stuff I'd want to do anyway that requires little or no equipment. Down time is my time. The only thing that stinks is an open office with no real privacy. People don't seem to care, but it makes it less enjoyable for me. I've been here 2 years now and no one has ever said anything.
I play chess on lichess and chess.com
Read on kiwix. Browse the archive.
Richii mahjong phone app
Art.
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