Down Time At Work — What Do You Do? 319
An anonymous reader writes "I work in IT and find fairly often that I have 'down time.' I'll usually browse the web (Slashdot) or try to find something informative or educating to read. Sometimes, I even get caught up working on my personal webpage or other project that isn't exactly work related. What does everyone else do during these times, and how much time do they spend on non-work related things while at work?"
What is this "down time" you speak of? (Score:4, Interesting)
The idea of having a job where a blocking problem means its time to browse websites, or percieving that my job would allow for that, is totally foreign to me. Seriously - are you honestly saying that in these situations that there is literally *nothing* work related for you to do?
(for those noting the time of day that I'm posting this response, I'm on vacation right now
Downtime? Ack! (Score:2, Interesting)
I go home. Employer calls it "flextime". (Score:5, Interesting)
If there is no work available, such as projects on hold due to waiting for somebody else (tech support, delivery, steering board decision, project member on vacation, whatever), I'll check if there's some low-priority stuff that I might do. Usually there isn't.
Otherwise, I'll just head home. My contract says I must 7,5 hours per day - on average. Not that I must stay at office 7,5h pretending to be working when there's nothing to do. Of course, it also means that I occasionally do the 10-12 hours/day crunch through weekends when stuff finally gets moving - but you didn't ask what I do on "uptime", did you?-). (And yes, I keep tab on the hours - if I get more than +40 hours on my flextime account I either get paid the 200% overtime bonus (has never happened, they haven't needed me THAT much) or stop right there).
(Yes, our project management could use refinement - usual situation that there are 5 projects on hold and the next week all five of them start up simultaneously - but that's another issue. Personally I'm comfortable with this - once you get into the "rhythm", it's much easier to just go on with the flow and do an "all-nighter"-style session - and once stuff is done, you can again have a few 2-hour workdays which consists of lunch, checking e-mails and do nothing more than say "hi" to buddies...)
Now, this model works for me. For someone with a family a more stable 9-5 mode might be more preferable. For me with my 15 minute commute it's just about perfect (means that if there's a meeting from 9-10 am and another at 3-4 pm and nothing else to do, I can stop by at home). Also my employer trusts me and my coworkers - on my first day at job, my then-manager said "we have a trusting environment in here - if you want to punch in or out for tracking the hours, go ahead, but we don't require it.".
My comment is focused on the downtime, as stated in the question. There's plenty of uptime to go around
Apparently this is not possible (Score:0, Interesting)
I sympathize (Score:1, Interesting)
I use this time to improve myself as much as possible. This can be through research, reading, testing, organizing, documenting, standardizing... etc... work related or not. As long as you're achieving some form of progress, and aren't negligent in your duties, there's little for your employer to gripe about. That is, unless he/she's a total headcase.
On a side note, it has always amazed me how, as an employee, there is little incentive to be your best. The more you do, and the quicker and better you do it, the more they give you. Now, SUPPOSEDLY, such people should be promoted/compensated. But there are only so many positions to be promoted to, and lots of eager people waiting for them. Few who work in such a fashion actually receive just compensation; this results in resentfulness and laziness. If everyone were payed on a performance basis, that would be great... but too often hard workers are taken advantage of by our broken form of hourly wage/salaried work.
Empire helps... (Score:3, Interesting)
What is this downtime thing? (Score:0, Interesting)
It depends on the manager (Score:5, Interesting)
He basically let us do anything we wanted, preferably to educate ourselves or help other team members, as long as our requests for help or special projects were attended to first, which we always did. Reading teh internet because boring after a while, because you can do all that in an hour, then you run out of things of interest to read.
I learned and managed to introduce Linux into the environment. We also developed a sophisticated network interrogation tool to gather infomration about a user's environement, applications and PC status: basically about 3 of us worked out that if we have enough information, most of the time we can fix a user's PC remotely, or do preventative maintenance prior to problems occuring. All this was done via Windows scripts which dumped data into a central folder, then another perl guru in our trio did some parsing of the reports and populated a database. This database was visible on a web site searcheable by host name. It was so useful and successful, that word reached the upper echelons of the company. We did not charge the customer anythign for this. It was all to help us do our jobs quicker. Pretty much two or three times a week we'd go out for a 2-hour lunch, and the boss sometimes joined us. On quiet days we used to even play networked games, and before the manager's responsibilities grew drastically, he used to join in.
After six years, the contract was terminated, and so the team got disbanded. That was the sad thing, the team as a whole, I later found out, was number one in terms of SLAs and customer satisfaction in the whole Asia Pacific region. It also had the lowest ratio of admin to technical staff at about 1 to 20 or so. The average in AP was about 1 to 5 and for some customers it was close to 1 to 1.
On a side note, when word reached the top of the management chain about the tools we've developed, they tried to make us stop using it because it threatened the potential sale of a "management" tool that they were trying to sell to the customer.
Back on topic, it all depends on what your manager can tolerate. A good manager would let you do whatever as long as your work comes first.
Re:Ping Pong... (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Hmmm (Score:2, Interesting)
Here's the problem (Score:4, Interesting)
During down time, try to look busy.
I used to work for a guy who was the president of the company, and thought of himself as a sort of royalty.
I was a Unix/windows admin/helpdesk/database admin/tech support.
I would come in at 10:30 and finish my daily workload around 3:30 including daily projects he would give on a whim, such as "design this database for me".
Usually, I would stick around until 6:00 to finish up extra projects he asked me to do.
He thought because I was coming in at 10:30, I was cheating him out of work. He then made me punch a time clock just to punish me.
Any time after finishing tasks, I had to look busy, he really thought I wasn't working hard enough.
Since it was a medical billing company, he started asking me to fill in my down time by doing data processing.
What a tool. Goes to show you, down time can really be rough.
Re:research or education (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:What is this downtime thing? (Score:1, Interesting)
Read Slashdot, of course (Score:1, Interesting)
2) Then, I got a job with Slashdot, which paid somewhat more and had some other benefits as well, like getting to meet in person some of the geniuses who pump out the free software I like to use. (This step won't work for everyone, though.)
timothy
Re: ...because you are the only person worthy (Score:2, Interesting)
Of course I spend much more time on football, which I admit has no positive influence for my employer whatsoever.
Yeah, self-study really is the smartest thing (Score:5, Interesting)
During the normal workday, it's always nice to check the news for a few minutes between tasks. When a company is in the death spiral, it's tempting to do nothing but. But that's the time when study becomes the most important. With the last couple of death spirals I've been in, I've self-studied to the point of being able to land the next job with the skills I picked up while on the clock. If the company isn't wanting to pay for new kit or approve new systems, there's still plenty of skills that can be picked up via simulation or installing the packages on VMware.
If I'm honest with myself, I have to admit I was on the lax side with the self-study. I picked up my skills and got my next job after the layoff but I could have advanced the time table a bit. But I'm in a better position than other co-workers I've been with who have let their depression with the job turn into paralysis and then the layoff comes out of the blue and they have no prospects, no current skills.
So yes, there is the temptation to goof off during downtime but you're not cheating the company -- they'll fuck and chuck without a second thought, you owe them nothing -- but you will cheat yourself. In this economy, you should keep one eye on your current job and one eye on what you plan to do next after you get laid off from this one. If your current job has you working with hot shit technology, no worries. If you end up in a tech ghetto with skills that won't be applicable on the general market, make the time to self-study.
Re:What is this "down time" you speak of? (Score:2, Interesting)
-goro-
Slightly off topic. (Score:2, Interesting)
For you see, I'm an EMT. Some days, I walk in the door, clock in, have no calls for my 8, 10 or 12 hour shift, and clock out. (To balance this, some days I clock in, run straight out for 35 hours, clock out and have to sleep for an hour before I can bring myself to drive home.)
Now, just because I don't have any calls doesn't mean it's all downtime, there is necessarily a certain amount of maintenance type things to be done, but honestly, even if you try your best to stretch them, you can't make it last for more than a couple of hours.
So, assuming that I'm working a dead 8 hour shift, and I've stretched my chorse for as long as possible, I'm left with 6 hours.
Okay, well, in health care, as in IT, there's always something else to be learned. (IT may develop faster than medicine, but we've been working on it a hell of alot longer.) So I'll try to do something educational, be it reviewing some current journal articles, or perusing through some of the reference books we have lying around, or doing some online CEHs. I, however, cannot successfully sit and read material for more than a few hours and have any hope of retaining anything useful, at least not for more than few days running.
So now we're down to 3 hours.
Now what? I've done everything I can directly do for the company, I've done all I can to make myself more valuable to my patients, my company and my future employers, and I'm still waiting to hear a damn set of tones come in so maybe I can actually do my job, because believe me, by this point I'm bored out of my mind.
This is what I call my true downtime, and you know what I do with it? Any damn thing I can think of to ease my boredom, whip out my palm pilot and read an eBook, go take a nap (Ah yes, EMS, the only job I've ever had where not only can I sleep on the job, but they give me a bed to do it in.) or, say, browse the web.
When I first got into this business, I used to feel quite guilty about that last stage, but slowly I came to realize that at that point, slacking off was the best thing I could do for myself, my patients and my company, because when the tones finally go off fifteen minutes before the end of my shift (as they are wont to do), if I've been going around making busy work for myself for those last 2.75 hours, I'm tired, irritable and discombobulated. If, however, I've spent that period slacking off, I'm ready for it, my mind comes to the problem I'm presented with fresh, my body is well rested (I would imagine this is more of an issue in EMS than in IT, but still not to be discounted), and I can generally slap a smile across my face (Which sometimes is much more important than any skills I might perform.)
So, I guess all of that is just me saying that with your downtime, you should definitely find something productive to do, and there's always SOMETHING that's been neglected, and you should work to educate yourself, but sometimes you should just play a stupid flash game.
That's just my 22 cents worth. (Sorry, didn't realize I'd be so verbose.)