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

What is this "down time" you speak of?

[6350']

I honestly can't imagine what it would be like to have a job where if what's immediately in front of me is blocked, then I am blocked from working. I battle to keep my workweek hour-count at something reasonable, and have never once lacked for (way too much) to do. Tool isn't working? No worries, I've got a huge list of things to do using other tools. Hardware problem? I've got an extra box. Power failure in my wing? Sounds good: Ive got loads of people I need to meet with to hash out problems and sync up with. Fire alarm goes off in the building? I'll hang out in the parking lot with my coworkers and have some impromptu talks on things I'm working on (thank god this happens less often now that we have heat sensing, instead of smoke sensing, fire alarms).

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 :P )

I go home. Employer calls it "flextime".

[Zarhan]

If I need a short break from work, I'll just wander to our cafeteria and do a round of bowling on the Wii at the corner, and after 10 mins go back.

    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 :)

It depends on the manager

[sasha328]

I used to work for HP at a large outsource customer's site. I looked after a select group of users. After a few months, myself and another guy, managed to get everything so down pat, that requests for assistance dropped dramatically, and our quality of service was pretty high. The manager was happy.
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.

Yeah, self-study really is the smartest thing

[jollyreaper]

I've worked for a lot of failing companies. I'm not management so I didn't have anything to do with the failures. Usually what will happen is the work volume slacks off but they can't get rid of me because I know important things so it'll limp along like that for a bit before deteriorating finances force a layoff.

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.