I frequently have all of my work completed, and I am unfortunately not allowed to work from home. This means I spend a lot of time sitting at my desk scrolling social media, because there’s nothing that needs done. I feel like I’m wasting my time, even more than work already wasted the best hours of the day. How do you fill that downtime with something that is personally valuable, but not disruptive or noticeable enough that you’d get in trouble?
If you are at a company and nobody notices you are doing nothing but “looking busy”, and that doesn’t get you in trouble eventually, you don’t want to be at that company. What the fuck is that, dude. You should be in a place of collaboration where people notice you, and notice if something is off. Otherwise the place is very clearly poorly run. Get out of there.
How many bosses are there that genuinely look at how efficient someone was based on objective data instead of going by gut feeling? How to even define efficient or any other metric? Way too complicated.
The boss doesn’t need to. If you are working with people, and you collaborate and talk about what you’re doing every day, you’ll quickly notice when someone isn’t doing shit. This will bubble up to the relevant manager and boss and they would have a talk with you to mitigate this behavior. No success? You’re out.
Not complicated in the least, if you have the proper team structure and communication routines. 🤷♂️
What kind of work do you do that it is so easy to see what and how much someone actually does?
For me, a new job could be a few hours or several days and I only truly know that when it is done and no further complications can pop up. For someone else doing the same thing, it could be the opposite (easy/fast vs slow/hard). Or it all hinges on one singular idea to solve some issue, so it could literally be a month without real progress and then it is solved within an hour.
Pick any freaking job lol.
Like, pick a profession. If you’re not producing or providing the service, people should notice. Otherwise it’s poorly run, IMO.
What do you do for work? That’s really starting to intrigue me.
Chemical engineer. But the same applies to any job where you need to come up with some sort of solution that is not already known or readily available. Anything creative really.
So if you never do anything but look busy, you won’t get fired?
No. That is not my point. I said that the most important thing is making the boss think you are productive/busy, regardless of that actually being the case. A boss can’t and/or does not use objective data to assess productivity. At least I have never seen that anywhere.
That does not mean that you do nothing. It just means that you can appear far more productive/busy/important/… when that is far from the truth.
I don’t know what to tell you. In my experience, in my line of work, if you show what you can do, you become valuable. If you slack off, you don’t. Showing what you can do will get you ahead. That’s my point based on empirical evidence I’ve seen and done first hand, and that’s the original point you were challenging. I’ve answered it now, so there. 👍