Ask Lemmy

Spend it all trying to look busy.

But actually, I'd take online courses in something you have interest (learn a new language?) or something you just want to know better (networking? programming?)

Or maybe I'd start developing something for myself. You know that dream app you always wanted but doesn't exist yet? Maybe you can create it?

Or maybe I'd take a look at the currently open issues for the FOSS stuff I use and try to familiarize myself with the code base enough that I can start submitting bug fixes

You're looking at it, bud.

Sit online responding to posts on social media...

I have to do 40/w but don’t have enough work. So I spend about 70% of that time reading manga online. I’ve also read up on a bunch of wiki articles.

Contribute to or make my own open source project. I dabble right now, but I just don't have the time to polish up my projects for public release or to learn an unknown codebase...

If your profession has a professional society or industry has a trade association, look into webinars, certification classes, or other events they might have. They often have opportunities to get involved with the organization as well, which could look good on paper to management when promotion opportunities arise

Play the main character in an office sitcom where nobody ever seems to be working.

A guy I know learns sleight of hand card tricks

Steam deck. I already spend my 1 hour lunches playing on it.

Try blender.

Bring down Skynet and also, cat videos.

• take professional development on my employer’s budget
• bring a book
• don’t be afraid to take slightly longer than usual lunches for errands or for exercise or whatevs
• if monitoring is lax enough, and there’s unmonitored guest wifi, bring your personal laptop and play some vidya

First of all, DON'T TELL ANYONE.

I'd use the time to learn a new skill, though at this point I have no idea what to recommend.

This is me.

I do 30 minutes of checks in the morning, check email, and attend the standup. After that i got hours to kill.

I teach myself things.

Learned how to mine crypto.

Learned advanced bash.

Learned boto3 and started automating aws shit

Wrote 2 books on automating aws shit.

Played alot of online dungeon crawlers.

Learned how to code a dungeon crawler.

Leaned how to code a 2d scoller game

Inked alot of comic sketched from (then) deviant art.

Just to name a few

You guys work 40 hours per week?!

I very annoyingly have yet to see this suggestion - go talk to your fucking coworkers!! If everyone is showing up every day, then you have a whole office full of work friends to make! Make a habit of hanging out at the coffee maker or water cooler or whatever and shoot the shit. Ask people how their weekend was. Introduce yourself to people you haven't met before. Just chat with people for 15 min or so at a time, and then go back to your desk and do something fun/for personal development/for professional development. Then you have things to talk about - and then just always have some job related task on the backburner that you can keep working on, so when people ask about what you are doing at work, you can say "oh yeah, I'm working on X, which will have Y benefit."

THIS IS HOW YOU PROGRESS IN YOUR CAREER. Yeah, working on your skills is super valuable. But the people who go far, the people who are never short on job offers or pay raises, are the people who have lots of friends.

Where can I find a job like this?

Contribute to opensource you use! Honestly I ping pong back and forth between swamped and bored , with contributing back as a good way to get ahead of future issues and involved in future work

I'm paranoid so I'd be continually monitoring the automation. 😉

Crazy. As someone whose job it is to automate, automating my job means getting more work. That’s kind of the definition of being more productive: by focusing on automation one person could do work that formerly took multiple people

My job has a fair amount of down time. I'll use it to study for career certifications or work on personal projects that are work-adjacent.

Educate yourself and learn a new skill that is useful for the job you really want, assume this doesn't last long and that you might get fired or laid off one day. I remember a story on reddit about some guy who had outsourced his job to India. The guy only played videogames the entire day every day, after a few years the gig was up and he was fired. Dude had a hard time finding a new job since his skill set and knowledge base was several years behind of where his field had advanced to. Don't waste this opportunity, sure play some games, fiddle around now and then but use most of the free time to improve yourself.

If I was in your situation I would just learn how to make videogames and then eventually try to release one on Steam made entirely during the boss' time.

I see lots of people suggesting non-work things, but that gets old fast and depending on your work environment can be stressful as you might get caught "not working"

I'd be trying to take on new projects. Start by getting to know your coworkers. If you have other people in your department, talk to them about what they're working on, things they'd like to see done. If you're the lone person in your area of work you could alternatively walk the floor and start talking to anyone who could be the stakeholder for a future project. Learn what their pain points are, where the current practices have blindspots.

You mentioned being a safety admin, I'm guessing that's industrial safety right? Start looking into whatever the current buzzwords are in the industrial safety field and make it a project you take to your boss and try to get funding. Find ways to improve the current processes and data tracking. If you don't already use a fancy incident tracking system outside of Excel, start doing some research and getting some numbers from vendors and have a chat with your boss about how using an actual purpose built database can improve compliance (that's about 70% of my duties right now is managing and configuring my organization's SAAS risk management database, but we also have ~10k workers in the field so it's highlighting useful data points in the data we've already collected primarily)

Unless your position is stuck below a manager with zero flexibility for process improvement, there's always new projects to be discovered and started to improve existing processes

There are a lot of recommendations to work on other SW projects. Be careful with this if there is a clause in your employment agreement (if you have one) regarding any work you do during work hours being owned by them. Especially don't do it on your work PC.

Mix and master my music. Music production takes a lot of time and eats up my weekends. 40 hours during weekdays would free up my weekends and I can actually rest.

e621 and a bullet vibrator

I made a little game in excel and then just kept adding stuff to it, it LOOKS like youre doing something important cuz youre coding but no youre fighting goblins :)

I read. Right now I don't have anything to read so I do origami.

This actually happened to me. I still had to look busy so I mostly just studied more or worked on a second job I had grading papers. I also spent a bit of time writing stories and designing things. Adding in something creative can help your brain balance things out.