Office Workers: Be honest, are you genuinely busy at work?

Planet_Switzerland

As this is a board where nobody is trying to impress their colleagues and people are largely anonymous, best honest do you have similar experiences to me or are you genuinely busy?

Comms69

Sometimes very busy
Sometimes quiet

Nature of the job. You could ask paramedics, firefighters, military personnel etc the same question and get the same answer.

Often office based roles perform key functions but not necessarily all the time.

DD265

Typically I can easily fill 5 days with productive work, and am often pushing out tasks until the following day/week to fit in more urgent needs that arise. Of course there's almost always some work that I consider to be less productive to fit in somewhere too.

That said I did go through a phase in maybe June of feeling like I didn't have enough to do, and I didn't enjoy it! There's definitely a happy medium for me between thumb twiddling and snowed under.

ruperts

I think the minimum I could do and not get sacked would be about 15 hours per week on average, but i'd be unpopular with the bosses. At the other end of the scale it would probably take me over 100 hours to do a perfect job. In fact I could probably find things to do 24/7 subject to diminishing returns in terms of value. On average I probably do my 38 hours, maybe 35, but plus a few more if you count thinking about work issues as work. I do a lot of my most effective thinking in the car going to and from the office, time which doesn't officially count as working.

Hours spent at a desk is a poor way to value someone's input though. How about asking how long it would take a layman to do your job? I might be able to complete a task in ten minutes by drawing on years of study and experience, whereas it might take the layman three months of reading before he even understands what the task is about. In that context would you rather have me knocking off at 3pm or the layman in til 6pm?

Have to say though I do notice that a lot of people don’t really work very hard, which is different to how I experienced work when I was younger, when it seemed that most people put more of a shift in. That might be due to age and the type of work I do now compared to what I did then, but it could also explain Britain’s productivity puzzle. Maybe the population has sat and watched politicians and big business take the !!!! for so long that a quiet revolution has taken place. What would be a very British revolution, where instead of rioting and getting all upset we just get our own back by spending a bit of time doing nothing while still getting paid.

Wyndham

I think the OP is right. I've worked in offices for years, and am rapidly reaching the conclusion that most people in most of them really don't have enough to do. This is especially true if you think about work that is actually valuable, and adds something. I know many people who are always busy (and make sure others know this), but really don't add any value!

xapprenticex

If your office work admin of the scanning and printing variety then i imagine there isnt much. I work in Finance, which is office based, i've not had a quiet day since the day i started, if that were not the case id have moved on by now, quiet days equal slow days, slow days equal boredom, I dont handle boredom well, its depressing.

coffeehound

My last-but-one job was intense and non-stop. Always more to do and under pressure from above.

The last job on the other hand was a narrow job description with a finite amount to achieve. That gave probably a couple of hours a day free to spend reading up on work stuff for background learning.

Overall I find it surprising how relaxed most office workers are about not appearing busy. Some openly checking their phone every five minutes. Others chatting for hours -- my boss would spend literally five hours a day chatting and would have been on £75k or more. Maybe it goes some way to explaining why UK productivity is low.

theoretica

I have two sorts of desk work - the stuff that needs to be done with a short deadline and other stuff which is much less time bound. So some times I only get to do the stuff that needs to be done now. Other times I can get more of the other stuff done. Doesn't mean I am less busy, just differently busy.

nicechap

You can buy this seminal work on Amazon about it.

https://www.amazon.com/Bonjour-Laziness-Hard-Work-Doesnt/dp/0752871862

trailingspouse

I do the 'office' side of the work for our Limited Company. I reckon it takes the following amounts of time -

- half a day a week for the normal run-of-the-mill stuff
+

bugslet

Like others, I and the finance manager that work in the same office, veer between bonkers busy and probably do the work in two days a week - August was like that and it's difficult to motivate yourself to do even those two days!