Do online courses in areas of your interest.

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 wrote a book. Always looked busy. Was great!

If I'm really bored I do actual work.

I walk around the shop and bullshit with others, maybe clean or organize stuff. Or help build panels if I'm caught up on testing. We're so busy right now tho those days are kind of long gone. Currently working overtime indefinitely til like 2027 at least.

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.

Mastubate in the toilet like every other sane person ?

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?

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.

What i do: oomscroll Lemmy, take smoke breaks, do "the little stuff" like organizing documents after your lazy coworkers, take a walk, read books and hop on codeacademy. Still - this freedom gets stale quickly because the most stressful part becomes pretending to look busy

I've spent a lot of time ruminating on the state of society and mourning the loss of better days.

Learn how to code

I check other job listing.

I worked a factory job for several years that had nearly unrestricted internet and the ability to install programs. There's a LOT of options here depending on your technical skill and what you're able to get away with. One of my favs was setting up a remote connection to my home network so I could work on project there without much fuss on the work computers and was easy to just close the connection if needed.

Also games. I played a lot of games... even designed some with all the time we had.

Learning web development was my most productive though; I was able to contribute to the company and got promoted to IT which launched my career to where I am now.

Browsing lemmy and watching TV shows / youtube.

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.

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".

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).

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?? 🤷‍♂️

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.

Im here. Hello. Currently working.

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!

I read wikipedia or fun books(novels) from zlib/annas. Also some lemmy and hn.

By doom scrolling on Lemmy and Reddit.

Any way you can learn new skills or get certs while you work? Take on a project to put on your resume? Help others? Hopefully, you will find something that challenges you or make work more appealing during your day?

Art.

When I was still working in an office I used to listen to a lot of podcasts.

Chess puzzles. Reading about my hobbies.

• 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

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.

Lately, Clash Royale