8 - 8:30 - Get coffee, stand around and chat with others getting coffee.
8:30 - 9 - Read emails. Read sports highlights. Read entertainment highlights.
9 - 10 - Do some work.
10 - 10:30 - Coffee! Get coffee, stand around and chat with others getting coffee.
10:30 - 11:30 - Do some work.
11:30 - 12:00 - Start arranging lunch.
12:00 - 1:00 - Lunch!
1 - 1-30 - Get coffee, stand around and chat with others getting coffee. Complain about co-workers, how you’re overworked.
1:30 - 2:00 - Do some work.
2:00 - 2:30 - Coffee! Get coffee, stand around and chat with others getting coffee.
2:30 - 3:00 - Afternoon slump - read emails. Read sports highlights. Read entertainment highlights.
3:00 - 4:00 - Do some work
4:00 - 4:30 - Start making plans for after work. Take some calls about/from your kids.
4:30 - OTFD.
This is just your basic plan - the Deluxe Versions come with smoke breaks added in every hour on the hour, and /or taking/making personal phone calls/texts.
This has been pretty much my experience of Corporate America Cubeland, temp or not. It’s the most ineffective system of “productivity” ever. I’ve had temp contracts where the client wanted to extend for another month, even though I was doing – literally – nothing. I’ve had full-time jobs who repeated “That sounds interesting, we’ll think about it” when I proposed large projects for myself to do (which would have made our list management a lot cleaner and more effective) – and after six months of asking, I twigged to the fact that they just didn’t care (about the list management OR about the fact that I was way under-utilized) and just stopped bothering. That one also gave away work that fell under my job description to co-workers who were unfamiliar with the quirks of my job – I’d only find out about it when it was already done – so I had even less to do. (And they kept trying to pass off IT-related tasks to me, and would get mad at me when I pointed out I have zero IT skills and never claimed to have them. Ugh.)
So – I work when there is work. If I’m stuck in a cube job, this is rare. I much prefer consulting for this reason – that and the fact that I get a lot more respect as a consultant than I ever did as an employee.
If I’m consulting, I do tend to get a lot done, unfortunately not much of it directly results in me getting paid. I’d still rather be productive than live in enforced idleness for 10 hours a day.
It depends on where in my career I was. As a tool carrier, I worked most all the time. As a senior manager and low level executive, my shops ran themselves pretty well, and I got bored easily.
If I worked at 100% capacity I’d run out of work too fast. I already run out of work sometimes. I’m working on something right now and my boss walked in to take a look and said that I’d be done in no time. Funny, because I wasn’t going at 100%.
It’s amazing. I thought I was bad, but I’m sure I work over 90% and have a fair number of days where it’s over 95%. I can’t imagine spending even 2 hours goofing off.
I had a temp job like that once, with some division within the State of Illinois. Literally the only reason I was there was so they could justify their personnel budget. In six weeks at that assignment I did maybe an hour and a half’s worth of work.
This is me (community college professor). I am contracted to be on campus 30 hours a week, with 40 hours a week of work expected. Generally, though, I am on campus the 30 hours, and I probably work about 25 hours. But I work just as many hours off campus - I usually work 50-55 hours a week.
I currently work retail. It’s hard to disappear for more than a few minutes at a time. I count being on the floor, available for customers as working, even if I’m not actually doping a specific thing all the time. I’m also the odd-job guy, so there something for me to do all the time, often multiple things at once.
I work in a call center, so I am ‘working’ whenever the phone rings, or I am doing back office stuff- but as my job IS TO KNOW THINGS, and answer all sorts of inane questions that have nothing to do with what I am supposed to be answering, surfing the web could be considered work.
I’m retired now, but as a high school science teacher, not only did I stay on task during classes, but spent my lunch time with students in my room. I had an hour during the day to work on prep, and spent about minutes after school cleaning up, and an hour before school setting up and organizing. Then spent time at night and weekends on grading. Summer was for continuing ed, and vacations that would fit into a science curriculum.
This is not a complaint…I loved teaching. But folks who think teachers don’t work grind my gears (I’m watching Family Guy as I type)
Now as a retiree, I pretty much put in about two days a week volunteering. Nice!
I used to work office jobs, and now I work a government job (teacher), and I laugh and laugh when people talk about how government needs to run more like a private business. I frequently would put in less than 20 hours a week, not because I was lazy, but because I was efficient and there just wasn’t enough to do.
Now that I’m a teacher, the Mr. Dorkness show starts at 7:45 every morning sharp (15 minutes after I show up at work–the first 15 minutes is feverishly getting last-minute stuff done). I have planning from 10:40-11:25, and I sometimes goof around during part of that time, playing a game of KenKen or reading online news, but I spend at least half that time working and generally more. I have a half-hour for lunch, of which I usually spend about 10 minutes getting ready for the afternoon, when the Mr. Dorkness show resumes. Students leave at 2:35 (1/3 of the time I’m on bus duty until about 2:50). I’ll often goof for another 15 minutes or more at this point, but then I stay at work until 4:30 nearly every day, an hour past quitting time, getting lessons ready and papers assessed and so on. So it’s generally in the neighborhood of working 90-110% of my work day.
The best grading involves giving students feedback that helps them improve; it’s called formative assessment, because it helps guide future teaching (both for the student and for the teacher). The SAT is an entirely summative assessment: all it does is record what you already know, it doesn’t really provide the student or the teacher with useful information about where to go next.
And while formative assessment can be automated, at this point a human being’s personalized comments are much better than what a computer can provide.
I work in a hospital lab and I’m alone most evenings to handle the entire blood bank. It’s ridiculously busy and there really needs to be a second person there with me, but we’re having staffing issues at the moment, so I’m alone almost every evening. Things should be straightened out by the summer, but for now I’m working very close to burnout level. So, on a good day, I’ll get my 15 minute break. On a fabulous day, I’ll have enough down time to work on one of my paperwork/statistics/extra projects, which I have warned my supervisor will take me years to complete at this rate.
I voted for 80-100% in the poll, because I’m up around 95% or higher most of the time right now. The thing is, even when there are two of us staffing the blood bank, I’ll still be in that category because there’s just so much damn work to do. At least I’ll be closer to the 80% mark, hopefully. It’s a good thing I love my work.
I know I’ve become something of a one-trick pony around these parts, but it’s nice for the trick to be helpful once in awhile.