HONESTLY..how busy are you?

LooseMoose

Being totally honest, how busy are you at work in terms of time you have 'free' (make yourself a cuppa, loo, chat to coworkers etc).

Really interested as I suspect the modern workplace means more and more of our time is gobbled up doing 'more with less'.

Me? Right now, I am 99.8℅ busy...different times of the year its not the case but we work in IT for schools and its CHAOS this time of year.

joeyowen

I work in a college delivering degrees... lots to do this time of year, but I enjoyed a nice break.

factor in hobbies, family and a toddler then very busy.

Chalky

I did some work in one place where, according to the staff they all worked exceptionally hard. Walking around the place regularly, their work largely consisted of browsing the internet, online shopping, etc. But ask any one of them what they were doing and they would give you a tired look and say they were just taking a well-earned break from their non-stop hard work on their ever growing workload. That's when they weren't on their 2 hour lunch breaks or leaving at 5 to 5, of course.

But then it was the BBC!

bingefeller

I'm quite busy in work on a Wednesday morning, not bad Wednesday afternoon.  Thursday is an OK day and I am very busy on a Friday afternoon.  

Roland

LooseMoose said:

Really interested as I suspect the modern workplace means more and more of our time is gobbled up doing 'more with less'.

That was certainly my experience. More and more time was spent doing "stuff" rather than thinking around the job. Our parent company introduced a project management system, with lots of sensible management activities. However, when these activities were put together as a project plan they took nine elapsed months, and consumed 1.5 man years of administrative effort. That's before any actual delivery activities were inserted into the plan.

We certainly work at a greater level of detail than we used to, and there are undoubtedly benefits of doing so. There are also the dis-benefits of doing stuff because someone else wants the data for analysis, or because someone believes that it allows work to be done with less skilled labour, or to provide evidence that you didn't do it incorrectly.

Are we busier? People always thought themselves to be busy. Are we more productive? Are we any happier?

dano

I work fairly constantly in engineering design, I purposely make a five minute break every hour.

Them i pop into another office like the supply chain and have to disturb them from Facebook to get something done, and always made to feel like I'm bothering them to do their job.

Maynehead

I was going to comment but I was worried I'd get sacked. Suffice to say I am not as busy as some of you in this thread! 

guitarfishbay

This is exactly what the frets counter measures.

lloyd

Not busy at all, I hate my job.

Stevepage

Fairly busy, being a Gardener I haven't got a boss breathing down my throat and customers happily come out with cups of tea and biscuits quite often. 

TTony

In my world, there seems to be far more time spent on doing stuff "around" the job, rather than the job itself.  Mainly imposed by regulators in the interests of transparency, audit-ability, demonstrating complete fairness, meeting health & safety guidelines, money laundering regulations (etc, etc, etc).

In the olden days, a couple of guys (invariably) who knew and trusted each other would meet in a wine bar, have a chat, and make an agreement.  Sometimes they'd even sign a piece of paper to confirm the agreement.  But not always.

Today, there's a whole set of forms that have to be filled in first, then validated, reviewed and approved.  When the forms are completed, only then can you arrange a meeting to decide who to meet.  Which is everybody, because otherwise you might have excluded someone unfairly.  So there's a whole load of time spent in meetings that everyone knows will be pointless, but have to be gone through so you can demonstrate that you've been completely fair.  After the meetings, reports will be written, and confirmed by all attendees.  A decision will (eventually) be made, written up with supporting evidence and documentation, reviewed, approved, and implemented.

And if you think all of that is bad enough, none of it happens in wine bars anymore.

axisus

Lots to do but a lovely relaxed atmosphere. My office pals break out into both intelligent and amusing conversation at odd times through the day. I couldn't imagine working with better people. 

ToneControl

lucky dip for me, as a freelancer
some occupy  as little as 10-20% of my capacity, some  (rarely) 100% all the time
not always a  correlation between pay and workload

tbh the worst  ones are 

• 10-20% workload, but must be in the office all day
• any worload, but people  want to stitch everyone up (including you) because the place is toxic

mike_l

flat fucking out.
Most days I barely get a lunch break....
Usually around 10am the shit hits the fan, when the deliveries arrive, so it's unpacking, booking in, booking out, putting stock away, answering the phone, sorting the van driver's route.
After that it calms down a bit, but I'm usually 99.97% busy.

blueskunk

joeyowen said:

I work in a college delivering degrees... lots to do this time of year, but I enjoyed a nice break.

factor in hobbies, family and a toddler then very busy.

Similar - very busy

rolls1392

Retired 12yrs ago aged 49. Not been busy since!!

Panama_Jack666

I would say it varies between 80% and 110%. Been finishing late recently and lunch breaks have been a push. 

Equally I have down time occasionally. I enjoy it when it comes. Allows me time gather my thoughts and catch up!

Flink_Poyd

I get an hour a lunch break and I take every fucking minute of it, the other 9+ hours are solid work delivering and collecting. 

Guitar_Slinger

As well as doing more with less, there's also the problem of having to do extra jobs that somebody else did before they left, which are unrelated to your main role. You know those jobs that if you did them day-in, day-out would take 10 minutes? But because you only do them two or three times a year, they take half the fucking day to get into.

Guitar_Slinger

^ ^ I could do more than my contracted hours (unpaid), or research work stuff in my own time but choose not to on principle, as push back against cuts. And to keep my work/life balance, family time and voluntary commitments.

CabbageCat

I'd say I'm about 10% busy at work. Maybe 8% at home. I could certainly deal with more stuff at the office but hoping to get home stuff down below 5%.