good one. one can steal a solid hour from a boss with really good hydration. good health+screwing over the shareholders
One of my old jobs had a carbonated water fountain, you know I was up every hour getting my fill of that sparkling goodness
Don't fill it all the way when you refill, more trips if you don't wanna glug down an entire bottle of water in order to waste time. No one noticed if you only fill half way bit people notice if you go for refills without an empty bottle.
- Maximize bathroom breaks
- Go to the stockroom to track down something weird and obscure that you insist you need
- If you can afford to, offer to go buy coffees at the cool far away place people like
- Start a pointless quest to get some piece of info semi related to whatever you're working on and go talk to 7 different people about it (lots of variations on this that's perfectly defensible, especially when it's talking to HR)
- Pretend you've got contractors at your home doing work and keep stepping away to "take calls"
- Huh my computer won't work I guess I need to be on the phone with IT for an hour oh wait it's just unplugged whoops
Very career dependent. But a good idea, occupies you and tech support.
Based on my own experience. I had plumbers and painters at my house for a while and realized I could milk it a bit by stepping away from my desk to pretend to talk on the phone with them about scheduling, issues they were having, etc.
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Over estimate all work-related goals. You know it takes a day to get Task X done. Tell the boss it takes 3 if the wind is right and 5 if everything goes wrong.
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Read your phone on the can. Take no less than 2 bathroom breaks a day.
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This one is tricky but can reap huge benefits. Figure out when the first person to the office shows up and beat them by 10 minutes for at least a week, establishing you're first. Now start a PR campaign, telling people you show up an hour earlier than the first person in and that's why you leave at 2pm every day.
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Tell your boss you have a child even if you don't. Now you literally have an excuse for everything.
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Regularly complain about your computer not working even when it works fine. Blame missed work or lost hours on busted workstation and needing to interface with IT.
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Pretend to engage in research. Take a notepad with you wherever you go and pretend to take notes so it looks like you're doing something when your socializing with your potential office fling.
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Sabotage your boss' shit. This is tricky but a boss with a busted computer is less concerned with your whereabouts and deliverables. If your boss is a complete ivy league dipshit like mine is, swap the M and N key just to make them look stupid.
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Establish a bagel day. Buy bagels during office hours.
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Establish a weekly happy hour. Ensure it's right at or before quitting time which excuses everyone from when the boss asks "where is evertbody?"
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Establish a recycling program. Dump recycling bins during work hours. Take the scenic route.
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Convey to your boss you have a rare disease or allergy. This is particularly good if you have separate sick time versus PTO because you might be able to tap your otherwise untouchable sick leave due to your rare male version of HPV or what have you.
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Start a bicycling/walking/team building club with some coworkers. Do not do this activity at lunch but on the company clock nevertheless. Tangent: make sure it's not Toastmasters because that shit sucks.
In seriousness, I used to think that until I did it. As long as you tell no one, you're fine. I'm also sure it set off a domino effect of other people covertly fucking with him. That means 3 or 4 people out of dozens or more employees are operating in unity with no comms, creating chaos that is effectively untraceable.
The bagel thing is really smart, honestly. Bribing your coworkers with food is an easy way to get them to like you.
Honestly doing my work sounds easier than doing this. Your talents are wasted wherever you are. You should be a planner for central park day or something
This is a "Best Of" comp. I've been working in offices for 20+ years. I rarely do more than a few of these at any given time. Except for no. 1 - that shit is crucial.
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Walk from one end of the office to the other as if you were going to get something, then go back. Taking the longest route possible of course.
looking stressed and annoyed during the walk will also help. shaking your head, puffing out air in fake frustration, aggressive italian hand motions.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kafq7yrKAOQ
I worked for two weeks at a call center, never answered the phone and spent all day drawing dinosaurs, not even well, I made a point to draw like a five year old. I was also drunk. Maybe try that if you're only interested in getting one paycheck.
If you can swing it financially I strongly recommend just getting super easy jobs to get and then just showing up and not working until they fire you. You still get paid and it's really fun. Management can't really conceive that you're intentionally not working, play dumb and you can ride for a weird amount of time
When this site was still in its infancy, someone shared an excel script that would fake being active. I gave it to my wife since she's wfh and uses excel a lot and she's been using it for the past year when work is slow and she wants to do something else.
It's insane to me that someone would monitor your activity. Why do companies care about anything besides results?
You gotta know your workplace and be real wily and a really good liar in case you get caught, but just clock in and then go home. You can get away with it about once a year, more if you work for idiots or its somewhere that it's hard to keep track of where people are. I worked a warehouse gig where the place was big enough it was realistic that someone could be there and just no one saw them all day.
Make sure the place you work at isn't short staffed the day you happen to do this on. At my job, we were extremely short staffed the other day and one of the managers was so fed up with it he went around looking for everyone who was clocked in to make sure there wasn't someone missing. Two people had clocked in and left. Unfortunately, they got caught.
This happens extremely regularly, it's hilarious.
Step 1: put on a podcast (headphones).
Step 2: work very slowly.
Fucking around a lot will eventually kill your soul (most people want to feel productive/helpful) but it's awesome for a while.
Start selling drugs and focus on selling drugs to your co-workers above your real job.
I was joking. Coming from a back of working with addicts and dealers which are usually one and the same until you're a good bit up the chain, I will say it gets a lot more complex than that but yeah, probably don't do that.
I had a job that had me in a warehouse whenever I ran out of actual work to do on my main job. Here were several things I regularly did during my time there. 1: Take 2 hour lunches 2: Every hour or so I’d go sit in the bathroom and scroll r*ddit 3: Because I had two different supervisors, and the one over the warehouse wasn’t always told to expect me there, and the one who I actually worked for just assumed I was in the warehouse, I would use the time app we had and clock in at home and play RD2 until 5:00 and clock out. 4: Part of my job put me in a smaller warehouse where I was the only person in there, the front of that warehouse was an old abandoned office that hadn’t been used since the 70’s. One of the things left behind was this big leather therapy looking chair. I would go back their and watch YouTube or Netflix on my phone and take naps. When I was about to leave I thought about liberating that chair but unfortunately I did not. I still think of it sometimes to get me to sleep. 5: This wasn’t a time waster per se but since we travelled a lot and once we got back to my car I then had a 90 minute drive ahead of me, I would always clock out when I actually reached home. All of us installers did this actually Despite all of this and probably more I didn’t think of I was regularly given very high marks for performance and my boss told me that I was “the dependable one”
just think, if you were the dependable one, how were the other poor bastards?
They were all about the same lol. I guess the point I had in favor of me was I hadn’t crashed and trucks. Smoke a lot of weed with them.
I have to have my time accountable for projects/contracts so things like optional meetings and walking away for coffee doesn't work for me.
Personally I like to take the hard way debugging code and debug in a way I have to run a long and slow program for every change. This way I'm sorta productive but I have plenty of time where I can zone out, a la the xkcd "code is compiling" comic.
Posting here, online shopping, paying bills online, finding stuff to steal.
