One of my favorite jobs was drilling in an area that was closed 6 months a year so we spent 6 months on call 24 hours a day and then 6 months planning for the busy 6 months. I like the boom and bust cycles like that. It drove a lot of my coworkers crazy because they wanted to seem busy all of the time and so they never got to do compress from the full tilt time but I’ve got to incorporate it into my normal jobs now where I’ll work 12 hours days for a week and then relax for a week. When I get to schedule it I try to make sure I’ve got the lull scheduled right before things are due that way 12 hour days don’t go to 16. My clients seem to like it because a lot of my work get done early so they see a reduction in their bill but, man, it drove my last boss nuts to come to work and see me with my feet up watching TV in the middle of the day.
I had a weird situation a couple years ago where they made my contract position permanent, but didn’t hire me to do it for whatever reason, so they took my work and desk space and gave it to my replacement…but they never actually let me go. So I worked out the remainder of my contract, 6 months, with no desk and no work to do other than running a meeting thingy on Tuesdays. I used that time to listen to podcasts and read.
Nowadays my work schedule is really quite slow. The best I could describe myself is a marketing manager and so I have some people under me doing the technical work and I have a schedule of emails to send out, but that doesn’t fill my week by any stretch. I make it up by being available to those who need me, doing my job when I need to, and then filling time with Youtube, websites and this message board.
Another data center tech reporting in…there’s a whole lot of nothing going on most of the time. All of the networking/admin stuff is done off-site/offshore, so I spend more time doing receiving shipping/receiving and escorting vendors than anything actually tech-related. Occasionally we’ll get tickets to install hardware/run cabling, etc, but that happens maybe once a month or so.
My landscape construction estimating job has some ‘dead’ periods in January/February and then in August where it seems like bid requests dry up. The last year or two those have been more slow-downs than “stare at the ceiling in boredom” dead periods but there’s still a lot of breathing room on those days. Day to day, there’s usually something that could use doing but nothing that needs to be done provided I’m managing my time well.
In college, I worked Master Control in a television station which was perhaps ten minutes of setting up tapes and entering program switches followed by 4-6+ evening hours of making sure nothing caught on fire. There was a lot of book reading, pizza eating, messing with the satellite dishes trying to pick up cable TV feeds and canoodling with the girlfriend. Nice work if you can get it.
I prefer to call it, “Blue Sky Thinking” time. If you see me starring out my window, it’s because I’m “stretching my eyes”.*
*I work with a bunch of work-shy govies and hand to god that’s exactly what I’ve heard them say as they walked around the office with their hands in their pockets.
I’m semi-retired now, doing a little contract consulting just to supplement my retirement income, but I probably did only an hour’s worth of actual work daily for the last fifteen years that I held a full-time job. Mind you, it took me a lot of work and research for the previous twenty years to get to that point, but I basically just had to know the “right/best” solutions to some specific problems.
The ONLY reason that it made any sense at all for me to have a full-time position was that clients would want answers or advice at random times during regular business hours. Or, I would have to meet with clients to discuss issues and get a better idea of what their problems were. I’d say that a 40-hour week (I was an exempt salaried employee) was about six hours of work; twelve hours of meetings, teleconferences, and travel; and the rest just me goofing off or doing personal business.
Frankly, I think that the clients were billed at a rate and for time that was excessive, but they were happy to have us provide consulting services to them for the fees they paid and we very seldom gave them wrong or unhelpful advice. If we had billed in 0.1 hour increments, we would have gone broke, but we billed at a minimum one-hour increment and consistently made money.
Never in a million years would I have thought I could compare my job – proposal manager – to a homicide detective’s, but in this regard they are similar: I’m either working nights and weekends (only “catching up” when the proposal deadline hits), or spending a lot of time stretching my eyes. How busy I am is up to the federal government. I do feel like everything winds up more-or-less balancing out.
When things are slow it can be difficult to take on a meaningful side project, because the next Request for Proposal (RFP) could come out any day. I’ve learned to appreciate the downtime when it happens – sometimes taking a random day off here or there, just because I can. I’m grateful that I have a private office, so it’s not as obvious when I have nothing to do…or when I’m slacking on the Dope. 
Concrete finishing …
The mixer shows up at first light and it’s nothing but assholes and elbows until the mud is down and in place … then sitting around a couple hours waiting for it to start setting up … then back to assholes and elbows getting a finish on it before the mud gets too hard … the suck ass part is the bars aren’t open that early in the morning …
When I transitioned from the military to civilian life, I went from busy all the time to having periods of slack; the higher I rose in management, it seemed the less I had of actual work to be done. Part of it was my curse of being extremely proficient at managing people and tasks. Typically, within six months of taking on a new position, things were running smoothly and I would find myself being bored.
Network engineer here. I definitely go through periods of downtime where I generally write white papers or do blue sky discussions with the systems and security team to talk about what we might need in the next 5 years, or just sit in my office and write on this message board or watch YouTube videos. 
Other times I’m strapped totally with projects (many unfunded and un-discussed from other state agencies that didn’t think to tell us they needed something in this fiscal year) and issues that need my attention right this second. I think with a lot of the automation and expert systems available today it makes for a lot more slack than I recall from when I was younger.
Depends what kind of job. My wife is a teacher, and she definitely does not have any stretches of time with nothing to do. She’s “on stage” in front of her students for most of the day, and when he isn’t she’s grading or planning.
I’m an editor and definitely have stretches of thumb-twiddling time. I complete the work I’m assigned, ask around if anyone needs help with anything, and then wait for the next round of things to review to hit my desk.
In the meantime, I’ll spend time here and on Reddit, and maybe do some other internet reading. Maybe research a trip, take care of whatever personal errands I can do over the internet. Some days I barely have time to pee. Some days, I’ve done maybe 10-15 minutes of actual work all day. The bosses all understand this. I’ve been known to bring in my Kindle and watch a movie using earbuds and the free wifi (the secure passworded wifi, I stay off so I don’t bog things down for anyone who is actually working.) I watched a couple episodes of Jessica Jones during season 1 when I had a lull.
Recently, the Big Grand Boss gave me a really cool assignment. Because I’m the artsy one on staff, she said she was tired of all the art hanging on our walls, so she asked me to “design something”. I’ve dabbled in photography, so I’m doing a series of prints of nature shots that represent our state and we’ll hang those around the office. That’s been really fun, but even better, when I run out of stuff to do, I have an excuse for looking for great photos on my personal laptop (which I’ve brought in for this reason) and playing around with design software.
Every job I’ve had over the last 40 years has had down-time when there isn’t much to do. Some, like my current job, ask for volunteers to go home without pay. Others had you cross-train in other departments or sent you for additional computer training. Once I made management in my old job, there were constant meetings and keeping performance reviews up-to-date.
When I worked at one of the big Si Valley tech firms, I used to say that my work was never actually done. At some point, I just decided I was going to go home at the end of the day. But I could easily have stayed all night and kept doing shit. It was more a matter of: How thoroughly are you going to prepare for that big meeting at 9AM tomorrow; do you think it would be better to review some of those contract provisions one more time to make sure there isn’t anything missing; you probably should clean up those meeting minutes you wrote earlier to make sure all the Action Items are included…
I can remember a total of just a handful of days in my entire career when it’s been slow. Pretty much myself and everyone I work with, it’s one relentless project after another with too many hi priority projects waiting.
I’m surprised to see this many people say they have slow time.
Programmer here - we go through dead times at my work. Done everything assigned, now waiting on the staff (not users, not quality assurance, but the program team that decides what updates/features/etc. we need) to test the changes and make sure it does what they want it to do before pushing to production. And then we go through frantically busy times when they want a lot of reports, etc.
That sounds more like my work, generally. I said I have slower times, but it’s really more about my own effort than the job’s duties.
Maybe part of it is my perception of “real work”. Coming from an engineering background, I tend to think of “real work” as writing lots of code or performing complex data analysis. Or perhaps the reporting supported by such analysis. The sort of stuff that keeps you up until 3am or has the team working all weekend because if it doesn’t work 100%, it doesn’t work. But once I got into management, a lot more of my day is spent in meetings or calls (often just listening), sending email back and forth, building Powerpoint decks and other stuff I don’t really consider “work”. Or at least, not difficult or important work. Paper-pushing work. I would even consider sales more “work” in that your efforts translate directly to revenue.
The other part of it is having spent most of my experience in management consulting. If you aren’t billing at a client, we call that “being on the bench”. Now there is always a certain amount of bench time. Lag between when a project ends and your next one starts. Client has delays in kicking off a project. To a certain extent, consultants are expected to make themselves productive while on the bench - help writing proposals, internal projects, training. But most of the time, no one really gives a crap what you do. The problem is, after a certain length of time of being on the bench, the firm may decide that it’s not longer economically viable to keep you around. So consultants tend to get a bit edgy if we aren’t busy.
The point is, a lot less of my day is spent directly “doing” stuff and more of it is spent overseeing other people doing stuff. So to me, even though I actually have a lot of stuff going on, most of it doesn’t feel like real “work”.
My last job had days sometimes, endless days, when this and YouTube were about the only thing I had to do. And a few jobs back I got to read maybe three books a week on the clock. I royally hated both situations. What can I say? I have a low boredom threshold.
I’m in policy, so meetings, calls, reading papers, writing papers, thinking about papers IS my work. It’s definitely a change from when I was a roustabout!