A general question that happens to be my predicament at current. I’m a general safety admin/manager that has automated most of my tasks(emails/excel sheets)
Most days I doomscroll fediverse and lurk irc/matrix channels on the work desktop but am curious about more practical or useful things I should be doing instead. It’s looking like this will be my life for a good while since job market is abysmal and promotions are hyperstagnate(have also hit a wall in improving my scripts). If anyone has any similar experiences, please share and advise, as I feel quite lost and trapped :/
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.
A guy I know learns sleight of hand card tricks
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.
This is my rest :P
Depends on the privacy but
Read, draw, learn a language, sleep, gameboy/psp
ahh, I should get back into learning german/japanese. Thank you for this reminder
- 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
Bring a whole laptop to play games? Get a Steam Deck! Or if you want a smaller form.factor then get a Retroid Pocket 6.
Other than this:
- Learn something (language, art, etc)
- Read something
- Listen to podcasts
- If it’s a private office then do a Costanza and sleep under your desk
- Watch TV shows or movies
- Take up knitting or crochet
what is professional development?
money given to you to obtain certifications, for example
Courses or other training to develop your professional skills, preferably provided or funded by your employer.
I very annoyingly have yet to see this suggestion - go talk to your fucking coworkers!! If everyone is showing up every day, then you have a whole office full of work friends to make! Make a habit of hanging out at the coffee maker or water cooler or whatever and shoot the shit. Ask people how their weekend was. Introduce yourself to people you haven’t met before. Just chat with people for 15 min or so at a time, and then go back to your desk and do something fun/for personal development/for professional development. Then you have things to talk about - and then just always have some job related task on the backburner that you can keep working on, so when people ask about what you are doing at work, you can say “oh yeah, I’m working on X, which will have Y benefit.”
THIS IS HOW YOU PROGRESS IN YOUR CAREER. Yeah, working on your skills is super valuable. But the people who go far, the people who are never short on job offers or pay raises, are the people who have lots of friends.
Unfortunately, this will not help when working with people who are only interested in sports. I was asked which team i followed for the World Championship in football, to which i responded “I don’t watch football”.
Response: “Then what sports do you watch?”
“I don’t watch sports.”
His eyes widened while he stood there thinking for a second. “Then what do you do in your spare time?” He asked, flabbergasted. I told him there are other things in life than watching sports.
It’s like this for everyone I work with. They’re all hillbillies. I need to get out.
I mean, yeah, get out. But in the meantime I would suggest trying your best to find some way to relate. In 2 years maybe one of those guys will hear about a good job opportunity and pass it along to you “because he’s a nice guy who gets his work done - even if he’s a bit screwy to not watch sports”
The people I’m referring to are warehouse packers and repair technicians, while I create the automations for the warehouse. I highly doubt they’ll be able to recommend me in the future.
Have you tried… watching sports? I’m kidding. However, with something like the World Cup coming up it’s pretty easy to feign a passing interest. Even my mother seems in to it, and she usually couldn’t tell a football from a pinecone.
I have tried. Just not my thing lol. Like, at all. I love playing sports, I just don’t see the fun in watching someone else play.
And don’t get me started on the people who’s complaining about what someone on their team did wrong; they wouldn’t be able to do what the athlete do if they got 1000 tries!
I’ve had good luck sharing my own interests instead. A few years ago I got super into watching SpaceX’s rocket launches because it’s honestly spectacular and they know how to do a really good livestream, plus watching the booster come back from orbit and softly touchdown is pretty incredible (I’ve had a hard time enjoying the live streams since Musk’s involvement with Trump of course)
But popping over to a coworker and going “hey there’s a rocket launch in 2 minutes, wanna take 8 minutes and watch it with me?” is a brilliant ice breaker
Trust me, my coworkers would not care about anything as exciting as a space launch! I’ve tried sharing my own interests with them, but they’re not interested. The only thing I can talk with them about is my dog (because he’s allowed in the office, and they love him).
You need BLUFFBALL. A Bit from a TV show that somebody made kinda real.
Holy shit, that’s awesome!!! Also, I haven’t watched IT Crowd this year, so thanks for reminding me!
Talk to people?! That’s insane. Far better to deep dive into arcane coding disciplines and submerge oneself in niche strategy/fantasy roleplay. Fucking norm.
I read books on algorithms and data structures and typed out the examples. The work computer was locked down for installers but I could download open source programs and compile Java. One of the more interesting chapters I remember was parsing basic math operations for a calculator into a tree structure, evaluating it, and converting it between infix and postfix notation.
My boss probably noticed I had automated things because sometimes they would send new data requiring an urgent redo of everything, and I would send results back in a minute instead of the 8 hours it used to take. He didn’t seem upset, more like pleasantly surprised that a temp-to-hire pulled it off. I even got a compliment at one point, which never happened before.
One day I applied for another job that was a lot of what I already did and some of what I wanted to do more of. I called in sick to do the interview and got the position. It was good timing because the place I was at got acquired, and that never goes well if you’re in a group that overlaps what the parent company already has.
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 confused, why did you halt wikipedia writing and move on to wikimedia/longevity orgs(What are these?)? I’m also curious to see if you could expound on that last part too please
I am always seeking how to provide most societal impact with my work. Writing Wikipedia is cool and useful. But as a one person I can only do so much work and only about topics that I am knowledgeable about. Wikipedia needs much more and better content, and of wider range of topics.
So I have founded an organization that helps other volunteers to write Wikipedia. The intention is that by doing so, at the end I help Wikipedia grow faster than just by my own writing. Organisation, if done right, has much bigger impact (even per capita) than an individual.
For similar reason I am thinking about founding a new organization focused on supporting longevity research and public awareness. I mean advanced medical therapies to extent healthy lifespan at least by many decades.
When thinking about what is going to have biggest impact on human lives in next decades, there are several things. One of them is the option to (if one decide so) live in hight vitality well beyond the age 100. Imagine hitting 80 with health of 40, or hitting 150 with health of 50. Sciencista are already working on that, and current people under 30, maybe even under 40, will quite probably have the option to take such therapies and possibly live a very, very (possibly indefinite, but finite) live. This will change a lot of thing in society as many current social contracts stay on the premise of leaving to pension in 65 and checking out at 85. You may be interested in !longevity@mander.xyz.
You’re looking at it, bud.
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.
Use Rustdesk to remotely work on a computer you own. If you’re sure there’s not screen recording or keystroke spyware on the work PC, it’s pretty untraceable
Do a PhD in whatever I feel like on the company’s dime
Learn something like gdscript so I can start making my income less dependent on the company that currently employs me.
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 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.
