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

Documentation

[bensode]

Documentation documentation documentation and more documentation. I always bitch I never have enough time for documentation and then I find myself trolling /.

It's not the most fun thing to do but it certainly something that can always keep you busy and you can never have too much of it as long as it is well written AND well organized.

Re:Documentation

[TheLazySci-FiAuthor]

An ounce of documentation is worth a pound of analysis.

This is my mantra. I recently took-over network administration after a sudden firing of the sole administrator. I arrived at work to folders and folders of random word, excel and text files from 3 different predecessors.

Those before me had that philosophy of "it's what I know that makes me valuable".

For me, I'm an adherent to the notion of "it's not what I know, but what I can do."

I've found that documentation has allowed me to do so much more. I don't have to waste the mental cycles to bring-up older knowledge or to reconstruct some installation procedure from months past.

Friends of mine say that my excessive documentation is a liability: "they can just fire you and a monkey could read your notes and do your job."

If only that were true - imagine how successful I would be if I had a reputation for eliminating uneeded IT jobs. The bright-side has turned-out to be the fact that most IT jobs can't actually be eliminated so easily - because they are roles and not jobs. Thus, documentation and knowledge-dumping has no negative repercussions that I've noticed.

The only drawback to Documentation is the time, but with a wiki it's very easy to take 5 minutes here, 1 minute or 30 seconds there and the occasional hour spent looking at random articles for rectification, updates and corroboration.

Look for another job

[alandd]

If I have enough down time to get wrapped up in my own personal projects, I better start looking for another job. Positions with full-time pay and part-time work get out-sourced or eliminated, I'd expect.

Besides, while I don't like having way too much to do, being busy providing value to your employer and yourself is more rewarding than being paid to be paid.

Sounds like you don't like the down time or feel guilty about it. Go find another job or create a better one where you are.

You are new. I'll help you out!

[PotatoHead]

Research and Development.

Always it's this.

Things don't reach a state of running very well without people thinking about how to get there. Your downtime is a chance to explore an idea, setup test environments, write scripts to nail annoying and recurring problems, work on your budget justification, yes --surf some /., etc...

Ongoing investment in these things pays off. You are surprised less, plan better, and leverage your people, hardware and software better.

Don't worry, you won't get all the way there. Software update cockups, user error, and entropy in general will keep you busy. But, having done these things, the real downtime you get after that is rock solid! Listen to a few mp3's, surf /., read about some new tech, etc... you will have earned it.

Real work.

[ledow]

Downtime is for those projects that nobody will officially let you start, nobody "wants" and nobody will pay you to implement. Then, when you spend all that downtime putting it in, you pretend that you did it in your own time alongside your normal work, and people suddenly discover that all the projects that they considered a waste of time become something that they can't live without.

At least, that's how it's worked everywhere I've ever been employed.

For example, in a Windows-only school at which the only person who'd ever heard of Linux (the IT manager) treated mention of it like some kind of first word from a child ("Oh, you use Linux. That's cute. Tell me when you make something 'useful' out of it."), I had a few hours of downtime. Found a spare "obsolete" PC. Found a couple of network cards. Was tired of the "Linux being nothing more than a toy" digs.

In three hours (including install, configuration and a lot of testing) I implemented a caching, transparent proxy/filter which to this day is still filtering the Internet (with zero configuration changes either on the clients, servers or any other devices) for over a thousand users without anybody noticing any difference and saving the school in question several thousand pounds on buying their own filtering appliance (from the prices we were quoted). I implemented it in an afternoon and it went into full live service when school finished that day and is still there churning away. It's zero-maintenance (unless someone wants a particular website blocked, in which case they just stick its name into a plain text file), "invisible" to the network users so, unlike some of the other network equipment, the kids don't try to "hack" it and even if they do only the squid port actually does anything.

It's never been rebooted, never caused a problem, is the only thing standing between the kids and the nasty side of the Internet, is now the de facto and only Internet filtering within the school and if it ever "breaks" it has a Cat5-coupler taped to it with instructions - couple the "In" Ethernet cable to the "Out" cable and, without doing anything else, you bypass the filter without anyone noticing more than a seconds downtime. Obviously, it's in a secured cabinet so that only the IT manager can do that, but the demonstration of "now we're filtered, *click*, now we're not, *click*, now you're running off my proxy, *click*, now it's all back how it was before today, *click*"... was enough to silence the Linux-critic once and for all.

Then there's the school running a Jabber IM system that they "would never use". Then there's the school running the PHP helpdesk for which they had no use. Then there's the one whose IT department are running their own recording CCTV computer which nobody but the IT department know about, which emails them movies of any movement in the IT office overnight or when nobody is supposed to be in - it's already caught several "wanderers" who just happened to walk through the locked IT office when they had no need to and "just looked" at the pile of laptops hidden away. That system later got re-used to record classes for approximately £500 less per camera then our usual CCTV supplier.

All the best projects are done when you let the people who know how just let loose with their own ideas and not worry about whether the end product will be useful. Downtime is perfect for this and turns the most boring moments into the most interesting, especially if you have a large IT team who can all "show off" to each other.

Re:get to work!

[e4g4]

Dude, calm down. Perhaps if you took a break from your work once and again, you wouldn't be so stressed out. I work 50 hours a week on average, and sometimes in the middle of the day, I'll take a break from working (oh noes); sometimes when I've worked 4 12 hour days in a row, I'll take a day off, a weekday! Work is not slavery, nor servitude; you provide a product to your employer, for which you are duly compensated - that's it.

Re:What is this downtime thing?

[reanjr]

This is why I spend my "down-time" scripting away my job to generate more down-time.