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

DontBringBertie

2 jobs ago, I was constantly busy, often had to stay late and meet short notice deadlines.

My last job was ridiculous - we had a team of 6 and could have managed with a team of 3 easily. I probably had about 2 days worth of work to do in a week. And it’s the sort of job where you can’t really create too much of your own work. 3 of the team were 55+, had been at the company for over 10 years and were just counting down the days until retirement. They were so bored they used to ‘work from home’ at least 2 days a week. Although my boss used to make himself appear busy by creating ‘catch up meetings’ with project teams and try to stretch them out to an hour.

I’ve found most people claim they’re a lot busier than they actually are. Only natural though, hardly going to say “I’m getting paid to browse the internet most of the week”.

Kynthia

I work in Finance and I've had to leave a role due to being too busy. The amount of work was staggering and required unpaid overtime every day yet even then tasks couldn't be completed. There were improvements I wanted to make which would have reduced the time to complete some tasks but there was no time to implement them. Other roles have been busy, but achievable but there was always some non-essential things you never got around to, some of which would have been satisfying to do as would have been improvements.

shortcrust

I've experienced extremes. I've worked in civil service offices where you really had the feeling that the whole building could be taken out and no one would notice. I worked 10 to 4 for years with a two hour lunch (contracted for 37.5 hours) and no one cared because the small amount of work I had to do was always done. I moved to local government and everyone was very busy and very efficient. It was a culture shock! I once rang in because of the snow (an automatic day off in the civil service) and they politely suggested I start walking. My private sector experience was of busy but inefficient offices with work unevenly distributed.

After a career change I became a health prof in the NHS. I had no idea was busy meant until then. I eventually quit and went self employed because I couldn't cope with the workload and felt I was going to end up at a tribunal sooner or later.

rubble2

The company I own carries out technical support work for many office based businesses (solicitors, accountants, call centres etc).

We have to carry out certain tests on workstations that take maybe 5 - 10 minutes at a time.

There is always one person in each office (usually a middle aged woman -not wishing to be ageist or sexist) for whom this interruption is a massive inconvenience because they 'are so busy' can you do mine 'when I go to lunch?' Five minutes later you will see her away from her desk with a cup of tea in her hand talking to a colleague about last nights telly.

Oddly enough, the more senior the person is the more co-operative they are.

Alter_ego

Interestingly most posts on this thread were outside office hours. Are you posting at work?

Smodlet

You want a busy office job? Try telecoms, utilities or, gods forbid, working in the DWP. Then complain how little you have to do. Go on.

ThemeOne

Impossible to generalise, but I will say that most office jobs I've done, and most I've observed others do are not that busy most of the time.

They are often made to seem busy by the people doing them for a number of reasons:

Some people just like "being busy" so carry out all kinds of unnecessary tasks to fill the time, or to prevent others getting the idea they have spare time.

Some are simply not very organised with their time, and fail to prioritise, spending too long on unimportant tasks, then when something urgent comes up ending up having to stay late to complete it.

Some struggle with the job, and work very slowly.

Kim_kim

Alter_ego wrote: »

Interestingly most posts on this thread were outside office hours. Are you posting at work?

I’m on a weeks leave, my post was at 8.30am

Michael.E.Keane

Comms69 wrote: »

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.

Exactly the same. Sometimes there are million tasks to do and the next you have one or two.

Tabbytabitha

pmduk wrote: »

I remember an office job I had where our work for the year came in a 3-month spell. Nowadays the main time-waster in offices is the meetings-mentality. You'll sometimes see people comparing diaries to check that they're not missing out on meeting they could attend.

I appreciate that not all meetings are productive but they're certainly work.