I wrote a book. Always looked busy. Was great!
this post was submitted on 22 Oct 2025
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Highly recommend this. (My book is shit, and will never see the light of day, but I had so much fun writing it.)
Never think of your writing like that. Remember that both Twilight saga and 50 shades of grey exists as best sellers. Your writing is clearly better than that (just from this post!).
Consider something like Smashwords, or even sticking it on Amazon for free/cheap. You may not be the next Tolkien, but you worked on the book, let people read it!
What's your book genre and about?
Depending on how much of an asshole your company is, they probably have the rights to your book because you did it on company time
Do online courses in areas of your interest.
Yes! Bonus points if your areas of interest align with your job, you may be able to get your company to foot the bill
If I'm really bored I do actual work.
Mastubate in the toilet like every other sane person ?
We have just the one porta potty. It's gonna be a challenging wank not just because of the nastiness but also because of the pressure from people lining up to use it
Skill issue
I mean I did say challenging and not impossible
I write really dumb powershell scripts. One throws up a GUI with a picture of a wizard holding a magic 8-ball, clicking the 8-ball gives a random response from a list of responses. It was kind of fun figuring out how to store images in the script (just went with base64)...
Its always a fun way to guess if the meeting with M$ is going to be beneficial or not.
I have no downtime like that. Quite the contrary. I have too much work, too many responsibility, and want to fix and improve things that annoy me which adds more.
I do visit programming.dev, which is a distraction, but tangential in my field of work, sometimes directly useful.
Same. I work from clock in to clock out and don't usually even have a second to check for messages on my phone from family.
Once I ended up in a situation where I was required to be present in the office but didn't actually have any tasks to perform (all work on our project had been halted by some patent lawsuit).
So I simply talked to my manager and asked if it'd be OK if I used the time I had to sit there with nothing to do to work on open source projects and after some initial confusion he agreed to this so that's how I then spent my working days (until the work they actually paid me for eventually got going again).
Chess puzzles. Sometimes informational YouTube. There's not usually that much time though.
Learn how to code
Watch out for potential troublemaking coworkers who think youre hacking.
Or the ones who think you're trying to make everyone redundant. I've worked on scripts that have been shut down because a co worker thought it would make people lose their jobs so they complain to the boss.
As a dev, me too
By doom scrolling on Lemmy and Reddit.
Im here. Hello. Currently working.
I've spent a lot of time ruminating on the state of society and mourning the loss of better days.
Sometimes I chat with coworkers. I work in IT so sometimes I go on a rabbithole of random computer stuff. Usually though, I don't have enough time to "kill".
Would you be able to create even more work for yourself and get paid more for doing it? Like suggesting things to be done, or doing side projects?
You don't. I'd ask my lead/supervisor if there is any other item to work on. Doing this consistently will get you promoted.
I read wikipedia or fun books(novels) from zlib/annas. Also some lemmy and hn.
if you drop the file in word, it almost looks like you’re working
Nursing student / surgical tech here. I do a lot of my studying at work when I'm not scrubbed in to a surgery. All our text books are digital, so I can whip my phone out at any time to get some reading done, especially if I can pop a headphone in and use the text-to-speech features to listen to them - I'll do that while I'm restocking supplies / pulling the next days cases / cleaning / checking for out-dates. Surgery schedule is always feast or famine, so when we're not occupied with patient care there are a hundred other ways to keep busy - but most of those don't really require thinking, so time for school.
Paying me to poop is also a fantastic use of my employer's income. There's a crazy correlation with the amount of busy work pushed on us vs the severity of constipation that shows up out of the blue. Sometimes it just takes a half hour to drop a log, ya know?? 🤷♂️
When I was still working in an office I used to listen to a lot of podcasts.
And audio books
At a customer service job I'd read whole books in the browser. Just keep the window small and it looks pretty inconspicuous.
Now I work from home so I look at Lemmy and such on my phone.
I have a hard rule of never playing video games on the clock because that's a slippery slope.
There is always more documentation to update sadly.
There is always old customer data to remove. I am currently working on a plan to remove the vxlan and firewall sub interfaces for a customer that was lost 3 years ago.
- see if there's literally anything else you can do to improve or polish what you just worked on
- set if there's anyone else that might need help with their work or who you can mentor
- learn new things you can put on your resume it that will help you in your job
- learn stuff in general that isn't directly work related, but maybe related to your next job/what you would like to work with
this was how I got my wow addiction back in 2005
When I'm done I go home. Benefits of being self-employed.
This wasn't ever much of an issue in my previous job either. Work fills the time given for it. If there's literally nothing to do then I'd browse reddit/Lemmy or watch YouTube videos.
I often bring a sewing project to work.
Patchwork just like my software projects.
Lately, Clash Royale
Do crosswords and puzzles to keep the ol' brain moist. The odd bit of doomscrolling as well of course.
I'm currently waiting for the line cleaner to work it's magic so am just sat in our site office.
There's no stock deliveries until tomorrow, it's too wet to paint (thanks Benjamin) so I'm relishing the quiet time before we go live tomorrow evening.
I'm a nerd who plays and GMs tabletop RPGs with friends. I often use slack time at work to build out my campaigns and characters.
Browsing lemmy and watching TV shows / youtube.
Art.
I check other job listing.
Your seeing it for me.
That and ebooks/royal road/audiobooks via phone. Just make it look kinda like work and you should be good.
Alternatively, try to learn something new. Theres a lot of online resources out there!