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

You're looking at it, bud.

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

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.

e621 and a bullet vibrator

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.

• 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

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...

I work in a highly automated job so there is plenty of downtime between tasks. We are allowed to use our phones even though officially we are not meant to be. That said, there is plenty of self-productivity activities you could do. You could read books, ebooks or audiobooks, listen to podcasts, watch gym training videos, learn and hone skills in self-learning sites like Udemy or Brilliant, etc. Of course, one could consume brain rot media like Tiktok, Netflix or Instagram to unwind but we all know it's not productive in the long run.

This is not imploring anyone to do it immediately, but in my case, I do side hustle of day trading and market speculation. While I am doing it, I learn as much as I could with how to trade better and reading the stock market news. I am not rich but I get couple of bucks every now and then. On the luckiest of days, I could earn hundreds within days. That supplements my income. It does not always work of course, I had my "bull run" two months ago but the stock market slowed down and declined even due to uncertainty in the market.

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.

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?!

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

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

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

A guy I know learns sleight of hand card tricks

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.

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

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.

Depends on the privacy but

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

Try blender.

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

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 :)

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.

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.

Bring down Skynet and also, cat videos.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Study Spanish — or the language of your choice. Swahili. Whatever.

Gooning