I am an Administrative Assistant and at my last job and my current job, there has been very little work. In an average 8 hour day, I put in maybe three hours. I’m not goofing off—there just isn’t any work.
I’ve noticed a few other comments made here on the board about how much time people spend posting or what they do at work when they’re bored. Many of my friends also say that they don’t have much to do at work either.
So what’s the deal? Is this common in corporate America? Do many people not have much to do at work or do I just keep finding the blow off jobs?
Maybe I need to change jobs. I’m not in a typical job, I work 14 hour overnight shifts in animal ER, and my coworkers and I are on our feet almost all the time. Even at 4AM there is something to do. This isn’t to say that we don’t have our downtime, but for the most part, we don’t spend a whole lot of time goofing off.
Michi
Regular Hours: 8 per day (flexible schedule; usually 8-5, with an hour for lunch)
Average time spent actually working: 10-30 minutes per day. Most of the rest of the time is spent reading online comics or the SDMB.
No joke. The really scary part is that this is a job that pays enough to let me live in San Francisco. Yes, i’m counting my blessings and keeping my fingers crossed.
See, zyzzyva, that’s what I’m talking about. I am seriously thinking of changing careers. The only downside to my job is that the pay is only OK. If i could make more money and still have a very low stress job, I would be one happy camper.
I’ve had manny jobs, and at some of them (all-night hack, graveyard desk at a fleabag hotel) I did have time when I literally had nothing to do.
But I can honestly say that since I’ve been in my present line of work, I’ve never, in 20 years, not had pressing things to attend to,…uh, y’all (hate to end a sentence with a preposition; never mind the double negative).
It would vary, I would think, with the nature of the job. My occupation has generally cast me in a position of needing to continually generate projects, thus, I’m never done. Having manny projects going at once, with months-long processes at various stages of completion, results in there almost always being something to which I’m a bit remiss in responding.
And should I find myself at some crossroads where none of the works in progress need direct input at the moment, my ever present assignment is to get some new thing rolling. Ergo, never done.
And even if I’m not feeling particularly creative on a day when that scenario might come to pass (still waiting), I’m almost always a little bit behind on the administrative stuff.
If anyone wants to check the time of the majority of my posts, they would soon realize that they come from the normal business hours of the day. I spend way more time on this website than I do working. I suppose that’s sad, in a way. I could be solving world peace with all that extra time.
Some days I’m swamped. Most days though, I maybe have an hour or two of real work for the 8 hours I put in. I certainly don’t get paid as much as I like, but the coworkers are nice, and the two hours of work I put in are necessary for the company to run smoothly. Is it a sham? Probably. I don’t work as hard as I should, and they don’t pay me as much as I should. It’s an imperfect system, what are you going to do?
I’ve got about one class per day, so that’s at least one hour. Also, at least once a day I go off to the library to do my research work. That takes anywhere between one to four hours. At home, I read through my students’ homework assignments and work on their grade sheets, and if there’s web stuff I need to look up for work, I do it then. I’d say in all I work about nine hours a day.
Since I’m employed in a hospital lab my workload kinda comes in clumps. It depends on how many people get sick, drunk, o.d. or decide to do some welding in the nude on any given night. (That really happened by the way. ouch.) Last friday I didn’t get to sit down the whole night but then on saturday I spent a whole lot of time here. (Don’t tell anyone.)
I’ll be on duty Thanksgiving and I’m betting I get to do a lot more of this. And I get paid too, what more could I ask for.
I’m the editor of a small, weekly newspaper with a staff of -get this- two reporters. I typically work a 50-hour week, but most of this time is at home with my trusty computer. At work, my time is spent coping with the daily, monotonous breakdown of our computers and software and listening to my reporters bitch and complain.
I would rather work at home in the evening hours after my son has gone to bed than go in that office for a few hours. Peace and quiet–there’s nothing like it.
Work: around 35 pages of material to master, per class, per day. Averages out to around 100-125 pages per day of some very dry reading. Add to that miscellaneous organizational activities (student orgs, ya know; gotta be social), competitions, drafting motions and the like for mock trials, a paper for the “writing requirement” class (for which I’m reading 13 books, plus untold numbers of cases and law review articles), and, if you’re third-year, preparing for the bar exam, and you got yourself a busy life.
Couple that with the poverty of living on student loans. sigh. I’m told that this will be worth it when it’s over.
Pretty much feast or famine—either nothing to do for days on end, or huge piles of layouts and galleys landing in my in-box with a thud. I use the SDMB as a five-minute cooling-off break even at the busiest of times (as you’ve noticed).
But I have work at home, too: no more magazine deadlines, but I am working on TWO books (remind me to keep it to one book at a time from now on?).
