Do you remember in Office Space when Peter described how he had “maybe fifteen minutes of real, actual work to do each week”? I’m talking about that. Because I kind of feel like nearly every job I’ve had has consisted of weeks or months, often with little to nothing to do. And most times, I don’t even have a Lumberg hounding me about TPS reports. Like even if I wanted to hound people if they “need any help with anything?”, like I were a college intern, often there simply wouldn’t be anyone around to ask.
Combined with liberal “flex time”, “work from home” policies and “managers” who may be located in a completely different part of the country, it’s not difficult for me to imagine a whole bunch of office workers who don’t really do much.
Also, I know a lot of people think they are “busy”, but most of their “work” might just be sending emails back and forth or sitting in meetings where their presence is barely even required.
I’m plenty busy most of the time, and my only real slack time is when I’m supporting testing or doing some other on-site support where I’m watching other people do work, and even then, I usually try to bring reports or journals to read, or work on developing my data analysis skill set. However, I work with a woman who doesn’t really have all that much to do despite being a senior project manager type, and when she gets too bored she starts setting up a sequence of multi-hour meetings and then hounding people to attend them where they sit around and ‘discuss’ what they are supposed to be working on instead of being in a pointless meeting.
Aside from design reviews and presentation prep, I’ve never been in any meeting in my professional career that really needed to go past 45 minutes if it had been well-run with a good agenda, and I have yet to see a 500 slide PowerPoint deck that couldn’t have been more clearly and succinctly conveyed in a 20 slide summary and a few detailed reports to be read by specific technical experts.
If I had days or weeks of nothing to do at work I’d probably design a new boardgame, write a series of proposals for interplanetary exploration missions that will never get funded or even serious attention, or write creative fiction. Want to switch jobs?
Programmer here - the only dead time I have is waiting for things to compile, and (rarely) for data processes to complete. Which can seem interminable, but probably only adds up to maybe hour a day on average, generally broken up into small chunks, though on some rare occasions a longer compile is required with accompanying idleness.
Our few meetings tend to be short and interesting.
Datacenter tech here. If there are no issues or no new installs or decomms, which can be weeks at a time, I really don’t do anything but a 10 min walkthrough to check on the critical systems once a shift. The rest of the time I’m on the dope or watching cartoons. Maybe once or twice a week I’ll have to go reboot something.
I have the opposite problem; I have projects that are backlogged.
Every time a project comes in that requires some technical finesse, it gets thrown at me and/or my technician, without any regard to what we’re already working on. Meanwhile, there are three or four people in our group who are not given projects and do nothing productive… :mad:
I quit my last job because I would have hours of nothing day after day. I was hired as an engineering drafter, and at first, I had a fair amount to fill my days. But as the months went by, I had more and more idle time. I would go to my boss and ask for something to do, and if I was lucky, I’d get something a day or two later.
What really pissed me off was when I got a new job and gave my notice, he demanded I give him 2 weeks. In those last 2 weeks, I think I did exactly 15 minutes of work. My boss asked me why I didn’t fill out my last time card - I told him I hadn’t been given anything to do. I don’t know what he put on my time card, but I did get my full pay… for absolutely nothing.
That hasn’t been an issue at my current job - they keep me plenty busy, and I love it!
Before I retired, I managed a prison. Outside of the routine paperwork, the job was mostly reactive; I handled problems when they occurred. But when no problems were occurring, I had nothing to do. It was great if you could handle a boring day (I usually brought in a couple of books to read). Other people unfortunately could not handle boredom; if they didn’t have a naturally occurring problem to keep them busy, they’d stir up some trouble.
I had one contract that consisted of a series of task orders from the customer. When a task order came in, it typically required 10-12 hours a day for a week or so to meet the deadlines. Then 2 or 3, maybe 4 days of slacking off, long lunches and early departures. Lather, rinse, repeat. It went on for about 18 months.
Back in the Air Force, when on watch, other than a few checks to make sure things were running fine and daily cleaning task, it was mostly waiting for something to break. We’d be on watch every other month, 12 hours a day, 3 days on, 3 days off.
I worked homicide for 18 years. We didn’t have a murder every day but even if we had a couple a week, that didn’t necessarily mean me and my partner caught one of those as it was on a rotation as to who caught the murders…most of the time. If another pair were already working on a homicide. Then it would most likely be assigned to another pair of detectives. No one EVER volunteered to take one so we always tried to look as busy as possible doing something/anything to look busy. This was sometimes more time consuming that actual work.
If you ever managed to have a clear case load and people weren’t killing each other…we could have some really fun times and play some really really good pranks on people like getting the new secretary to re-fill the water fountain 3 times before she realized the was a gig was up.
But…when things were bad, you could find yourself working around the clock and NEVER being able to catch up no matter what you did.
I never have nothing to do. Sometimes I have nothing I feel like doing and no pressing deadlines. Putting things off just means that eventually they will be pressing deadlines, though.
Interestingly, I am also a senior project manager / business developer type. It seems to go with the territory. When you’re hands-on technical, it often seems like you don’t have enough hours in the day. Usually because the technology has to work. But as a project manager, once I say “make this work”, it’s not like they work faster with me hanging over their shoulder.
Also, I don’t like scheduling meetings for meeting’s sake. It doesn’t fool anyone. The junior people get frustrated and the more senior people don’t bother attending.
I can certain invent enough “make work” projects for myself. But that’s not particularly satisfying and generally doesn’t advance my career unless it helps build the company.
I thought about getting another certification (or even another degree). But honestly, I feel like they are scams. Particularly the money for various meetings, conferences and courses you need to complete your continuing education credits. Now I can have the company pay for a lot of that under “networking for business development purposes”. But I generally haven’t found too many people at those events who are in a position to hire consulting services. Usually it’s a who’s who of nobodies.
Unfortunately, it’s largely the same in the technical arena. I can go to spacecraft and satellite conferences and promote space launch support services and expertise but without funding and backing at executive decision-making levels it is mostly just chatter and some really competitive snooker games. (You haven’t played a real game of pool until,you play with orbital trajectory analysts.) We all have great ideas about what could be done if we could just pull the lever, and nobody has any real suction or influence.
Earlier in my career I worked on a number of proposals for fundamentally game-changing technology that was completely feasible and went nowhere for a lack of initiative on the part of career bureaucrats and legislators who couldn’t see past the next budget or election cycle, and after a while it feels pointless to even talk about it except as an intellectual exercise. I recently spoke with a former JPL manager about a proposal I woked on nearly two decades ago and he said that it never got to his level, but even if it had he would have never been able to fund it even though the capability it would have provided would be critical to future interplanetary exploration and would have supported a vast expansion in their ability to support the exploration of Mars and the outer planets.
By comparison, most of the work I do, while contributing to an overall project, feels like largely dust sweeping and box checking. Yes, the final verification coupled loads analysis cycle confirms what the interim verification coupled loads analysis cycle told us eight months ago, so either the rocket won’t wriggle its way out of control and crash into San Luis Obispo, or we’ve made the same error four times in a row and have no idea about anything, life is meaningless and we all die alone.
“One always dies too soon — or too late. And yet, life is there, finished: the line is drawn, and it must all be added up. You are nothing other than your life.” — Jean-paul Sartre
winter is slow time in recv’ables for me. It’s just starting to get busy now, I actually stayed busy until 90 min before quitting time. we make up for it over the warm months. It’s not taht I have nothing to do, it’s just nothing pressing. Not out of the ordinary to have 3-4 hrs a day where I wasn’t doing much. I read lots of articles on my smartphone.
I’m an office manager for a commercial cleaning company. I usually have a couple weeks where I’m busy all day with payroll, billings, etc. Then I’ll have a few days in a row where I won’t have much to do. I’m in an office by myself (the rest of the office staff have offices where we keep our supplies and equipment) so I pretty much can do what I want - web surfing, reading, playing computer games, etc. Some days I’ll even leave early if it’s a really slow day. Phone messages go directly to email, so I can access them anywhere from my iPhone and get the messages to my co-workers even when I’m not in the office. I’d rather be busy - non-busy days can really drag.
