My job had been extremely busy for awhile – to the extent that I would sign off on a sales order in the morning, and would be reviewing the parts for shipment just after lunch. In the past few months though, things have really started slowing down. I have a few ongoing projects; one of these was canceled recently, the others sort of stagnate and then show up again with some new problem. As an engineer, I have access to AutoCAD on my computer; this consumes the majority of my ‘downtime’. (I’m in the process of modeling my stapler!) I feel like it’s good practice; at least I’m staying familiar with the program. I also have free access to a large collection of drawings, photographs, manuals, and reports; many of these make for interesting reading and research. My boss actually encourages this activity; every once in awhile he’ll send out an email with a link to the latest batch of scanned documents, encouraging us to take a look.
I was a lawyer before I went back to school. Basically my own experiences are that the nature of work is intermittant, my usual hour were from 7 am to 9 pm, yet there were several days when I did little, many many many more when I did not have time to take my glasses off and clean them.
It depends on the job and the time.
The higher up I get the less work I do but the more responsibility I have that the work I don’t do gets done right. I don’t know if it’s worth it.
there was one place that i would cover when the main person was out.
i would have 2 books read and gotten quite a lot of knitting done by the end of the day.
at most i would have 1 or 2 requests, cover for the receptionist a few times, and every half hour check the fax machine.
amazingly twice i ended up doing overtime there. 8 hours of nothing and then 15 minutes from the end of the day big print job needing fed ex that night.
gol, i miss that place. although, if i were there everyday i would go broke from buying books and wool.
I used to work with a girl who would hand check between two spreadsheets and then key-in the data because she didn’t trust v-lookups (“they could be wrong!”). I’d say she was lazy and just wanted an easy way to cut down on her workload, but she’d stay late every night and do all that was asked of her. She’s just really …odd. She later quit her job to be a full-time mom …to her dog.
Reminds me of a job I had in college. I was an engineering student and had a summer job working as an AutoCAD draftsman for a company that refurbished injection molding machines, extruders and other heavy equipment for the plastics industry. My day was spent pretty much sitting in a group of offices by myself waiting for someone to give me a drawing to CADify. I would get bored so I would either read or model some of the parts in 3D (mostly I just created 2D work drawings).
I surf the dope and read while I’m downloading manuscripts. When I worked for a daily newspaper I had at least two deadlines every day, and sometimes as many as five. Now I work for a monthly medical journal and we just pick and choose which manuscripts are going to be in the next issue, and it just kind of flows together so the deadlines aren’t as stressful. When I don’t have anything else to do, I check on the status of backlogged manuscripts (I currently have 1642 in the queue).
I’ve had both - too busy to breathe, and too bored to live. I am somewhere in between right now, as there are times when all the shit hits the fan at once and I’m working late, but some parts of the month are pretty slow. Those are the times when I should be thinking about other things I could do, process improvement, etc. I won’t tell you how well that actually works. 
Out of four weeks every month, two weeks I’m insanely busy, one week I’ve got plenty to do but enough time to surf the net for a few minutes here and there, and one week I have a whole plate of nothing. 8 hours per day on the net gets tiresome after a while, at least if your workplace web filters don’t let you go to games sites.
This is why I love working from home. When I don’t have any work to do…I don’t do any! Ahhh.
That’s what I hated about a few of my jobs…nothing to do. It was horrible.
This made me laugh ruefully, though:
I’ve had people hold this up as an example of why my generation (people who graduated from high school around 2000 or so) is a pain in the ass to manage. Because we need “hand holding” all the time. :rolleyes: (Not that I think you’re saying that, of course, ivylass!)
At my last job I actually felt guilty asking my manager for something else to do, because I could tell it irritated him. Sorry dude, but by Wednesday morning I get a little bored, especially when I finished the task you gave me on Monday in 3 hours. And of course we couldn’t go home, because god knows when something horribly urgent will come up that has to be done RIGHT NOW! (Rarely were things that urgent…my work was on a pretty regular schedule.)
I felt like a dog in a kennel that’s let out once a week to play fetch for half an hour. After a while I wanted to bite someone.
I’m never without work in front of me, and actually keeping up with it would require a little overtime. Since my new manager has forbidden that overtime while at the same time giving me a couple of new tasks, he’ll probably be wondering why some things just get further and further behind. I think he has a learning disability.
I did have a job where, some parts of the year, I might have an eight-hour shift with literally no duties, and would read a book. Other times of the year, we’d be working 84-hour weeks.
Feast or famine, yo.
Me: Busier than hell 50+/wk. But I do have some time in between to do a bit of pissing about online, such as the Dope.
I wanted to add another comment about “asking for something to do” because the whole subject just irritates me so. It’s been my experience that when I “find something for myself” to do, I’ve either been told not to do it, because there was some system in place, or it was someone else’s responsibility, and I was “stepping on their toes” by doing it. (More like showing they weren’t doing their job…but ok, fine.) The thing is, I generally got the same kind of response if I asked “Hey, is it ok if I do [this]?” or if I said “Hey, I’ve finished [this], is there anything else you need help with?”
I’ve also had my boss come to my desk and give me some BS busy work in response to me finding something for myself to do. Why? Because I took the time to research new subjects online or quietly practice a new (job-related) skill at my desk, which “looked bad” to someone above my boss. Looked like I was just wasting time. To which I decided, “Hey, if they’re so dumb that they can’t tell the difference between me taking initiative and learning new skills and just screwing around on the internet, and don’t care to ask…hell, why am I working here? And why should I worry about screwing around on the internet on their time?”
Seems to me that if people aren’t doing a shoddy job, and don’t have enough work to fill their time, someone up the ladder is making some pretty bad decisions. Come up with a new idea, give people more flexible hours & cut payroll, make some people part time, something. If I fulfill my job duties and then some, it means I’m doing a good job. Some people are just awful managers who don’t know how to use the resources they have well.