Down Time At Work — What Do You Do?

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?"

Comments

Re:What is this "down time" you speak of?

[lymond01]

You should read "Downtime as a Conscious Choice" by Lloyd Dobbler.

Make it work-related--if only tangentially...

[Chuck Milam]

I find I rarely run completely out of work-related tasks, but I can understand sometimes needing to unplug from strictly-related work to reset the brain. When I need some "brain reset" time, I try to read up on something that at least tangentially relates to work, for example, I've been meaning to learn more about Ruby on Rails and some other newer (at least to this old guy) technologies.

I feel the more I learn and the more current I stay, the more valuable I am to my employer (and myself/future employers). Plus, if anyone were to ask, I can honestly say "I'm researching some possible implementations of the new [insert project name] system."

I should point out that this kind of pure guilt-free downtime is rare. You can always be updating that documentation *groan* or working on that nagging system with the logfile that always fills up the disk that you've been meaning to fix for months now...

Re:Slashdot?

[Jeremiah Cornelius]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satrap

Re:What is this "down time" you speak of?

[schmiddy]

You have a link to this book? Does it even exist? I don't pull up anything on Amazon or Google with that title or Author. How did this get modded so highly?

Re:What is this "down time" you speak of?

[megaditto]

An insider joke to an obscure 90's movie: some men say they are alone on a Saturday night "by choice."