How to appear busy while not doing anything?

Xiangyang Liu

Christopher Duncan wrote:

It's also a good technique for people who want more out of their career. Want to be on the cool project? Want to play with the fun toys? Show the company what's in it for them and create your own.

I think I went way beyond that. After doing it so many times, I am kind of tired and frustrated. So I ask myself, why can't I be more like the other guy in the office, busy all the time but not getting anything useful done? It seems there are a lot of advantages of not doing anything useful. Such as

Nobody is going to question your design (of nothing).
Nobody is going to complain about your documentation (none needed).
No production bug/issue will be counted against you at your performance review.
Finally you can laugh while watching "Seinfeld" show and understand it too.

:)

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Xiangyang Liu

Bert delaVega wrote:

It should be easy to look busy while not doing anything.

Don't under-estimate the expertise/guts/skill of not doing anything, it may take years of dedication and practice. :)

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ToddHileHoffer

Well, I drink lots of water. That way I can at least get up from my desk about once an hour to use the bathroom...

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Gary R Wheeler

The key word in this case is "appear". From what I've seen of CS jobs, a lot of them involve being very busy, but not doing anything of value.

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bryce

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BonshatS

Sounds like you need a vacation, or maybe even a change of job. I've had to work in environments like that before and it helped to have a fun personal project, even something frivolous.

Jeremy Tierman

I have been in many situations like that before, and all of them pretty much had the same thing in common...people are either jealous or frightened of your abiltities... For real. If they are jealous, then they can try to tear you down so that you don't make them look so bad by being that much more productive and intelligent. This can make some also frightened, because management make wake up and want more people like you. In one situation, I had the director tell the CIO that she wished she had 50 people like me...when this got out...you could guess the havoc. This same place took me 2.5 years to get them to install a VPN solution in (2001-2004 timeframe). I feel your pain. :^)

micmanos

Not really. I'm doing a lot of things for my company but unfortunately, not having a clue of IT, they will never realize what i'm doing so in parallel with my actual work, i have to appear as doing something that they thing is of value .... ain't life strange ?? :laugh:

BadKarma

You should come up with a new brilliant design. And then you must create a bug which can only be solved with your design. Then you even get some extra time to : - find the bug - design a solution - solve it. Works like a charm. :laugh:

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Zhat

Being busy gives the appearance of being busy while doing something instead of nothing, if that helps... :)

modified on Wednesday, May 28, 2008 9:26 AM