Ask Lemmy

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.

In the past I would write Wikipedia or translate libre software. Now I would work on developing Wikimedia and longevity organizations. Especially the engineered longevity have a huge future societal impact.

I'm making a browser based game about losing your job and then picking up cans to deposit them at 10c a piece for a living. Like the existential paperclips game.

Make video games so I can leave the job I automated and do what I want to do. Which would probably also give me shit loads more time for activism.

I've expanded the scope of my job. From sysadmin to Information Security Officer etc. etc.

Depends on the privacy but

Read, draw, learn a language, sleep, gameboy/psp

You just need to find a hobby that you can do at work. Can be reading books, making music, playing video games, watching TV shows, chess etc.

Working on some hobby coding project could also be fun. When work is slow I work on an HTTP client that's terminal based.

Also check if you can go out for a haircut or do misc errands and with enough excuses you could put a gym workout while at work. Maybe you say you have a dentist or a doctors appointment but go to the gym instead. Kids are also a great excuse like "my kid is sick today so I'm going to pick him up and leave early" and you just go to the gym and do groceries.

If I had that type of situation I'd play tons of video, right now I'd play factorio and go to the gym. I might also see if there are some nice people at work that I can schedule a meeting with to just banter.

Fanfiction.

I've been there. I worked on learning a language some, read so many books, began documenting an organizing large data sets I had for personal projects. I also spent so much time watching speed runs.

Automate the undesirable tasks of my life. Probably means learning to write mobile apps. But maybe some AI tools for like making a meal plan every week. Or contribute to existing open source projects that accomplish the same.

Does this job have a claim on IP you create on company time? If not, I'm making videogames and contributing to FOSS projects.

Most days I doomscroll fediverse

Yep. Same. When I worked at an office, my coworkers and I would play ping pong a lot.

Also, I would work on my own software projects. This has the advantage that it looks like you're doing work work.

Or... go off into a corner of the office and play some games on Steam.

Take long walks. I used to be able to kill about half an hour walking around my old office park. Do more laps...

Drive somewhere kinda far for lunch.

Grind leetcode. Doesn't hurt to stay sharp.

Gooning

Look for another job; I despise being in the office to begin with, and being bored in the office is an insufferable hell. Reading and listening to music is ok, but I prefer to do that at home.

Make an pseudo-CEO AI agent for the company you work for ... and track its decisions versus the actual CEO's performance.

Let their own data destroy C level careers and their money hoarding. Publish book. Retire.

If I was still young and ambitious: work on certs and resume building.

Now that I'm old, burned out, and planning to retire (financially ready or not) I primarily work on game prep for my tabletop RPGs hobby.

I've actually been in this situation when I was working as a sys admin at a webhosting company. First I played a lot of games. Once that started to get boring I taught myself how to code which set me up to transition from sys admin to development work.

Work on the backlog! Of what? Anything! My back log of books, video games, hobby projects sitting half finished in my workshop! My boss would stop by and I'd have my soldering iron and extractor fans set up and I'd be like "Yeah, I'm waiting on the phones right now."

Learn something like gdscript so I can start making my income less dependent on the company that currently employs me.

Honestly an AI use I'm kinda OK with is that it's making audio transcription services good enough that nurses can start using them and they auto generate a flowsheet for the qualitative data from spoken word (you'd review before submitting) and tbh if I could get back to providing actual patient care instead of filling in spreadsheets that would be cool.

If you are young, maybe ask your boss for more work or take additional work from a related position. If you let your skills rot it will end up costing you in the long run.

I play a lot of gameboy

I suggest building your skills in your career by taking classes. You can also learn a new language with all that time. If you’re feeling creative writing a book is also a great hobby.

I think the thing that would be the most productive would be to start a project you've been waiting to work on or something that might make you money. Either studying something you've always wanted to do or programming/writing something you've always wanted to write.

With 40hrs of paid time you could write whatever you'd like and it doesn't really matter if it pays off or not so you're not pressured to compromise on it. But if it does pay off then you're that much closer to an early retirement or the ability to take more control of your time by working on the thing you want to do.

If you're happy where you are then yeah. Read a book, play some games etc.

You can never hit a wall with programming. You can always keep improving your scripts. You could add observability or logging. Try different languages. Create a DSL for it.

Check out Language Oriented Programming with Racket.

Create a full test suite. Unit tests. Integration tests.

Where are you running your scripts? Do you have a deployment pipeline?

Workflow tools like Apache Airflow make for nice observability.