to take my 'downtime' during work hours?

[wishfortime]

By 'downtime' I mean nice easy things, like online shopping, coffee breaks, and a bit of random internet surfing.

I work full time and have a 90 minute standing/rushed commute.

Mornings are a rush with early start and nursery drop off etc, My DH picks up DC from nursery between 6 and 6.30 pm, and i reach home about 7pm, spend an hour doing bath, bedtime routine with DC while my husband cooks, we eat at 8.30 then its cleaning kitchen, laundry and general housework, and getting sorted for next day while my DH catches up on work emails. Weekends are also quite jam packed as both our families live far away, so more often than not we either are travelling 300 miles (at least once/twice a month), or family/friends are staying with us.

So I don't get any 'free time' at home, hence i feel i need to take some 'down time' at work. My workload isn't always 100% capacity, but its the type of job where i need to be there and available or it impacts the team. Its paid well and often things kick off i do need to work late into the evening, and sometimes at weekends from home. (I don't get paid for this 'overtime', which is how i justify to myself that the downtime at quieter times during the day is ok).

Surely all project-based roles are like this? My boss can't magic up more work for me during the quiet times any more than he can magic up more time for me during the busy ones! He's perfectly happy for me to spend a bit of time doing 'life admin' when things are quiet and in return I'm prepared to stay after hours (for free) when required (I've done four 11-hour days in the past week, for example). It's give and take.

YANBU
I have a similar demanding job. I feel like as long as you are working on average more (not counting the breaks) than your normal hours and you are able to skip/shorten your long break the days there is urgent work to do, then it is fine to have a long break or multiple breaks for personal things.
I take at least 1h break everyday + 5-15min several times a day, but I often leave at 7-8pm when I can technically leave at 6.

There are some very strange people on this thread.

I have a salaried job. My contract says I work 36 hours a week plus whatever additional hours are required to deal with the demands of the work: I imagine the OP's says something similar. It says absolutely nothing about where, when or how I get the job done.

In quiet times I probably spend 2 hours a day checking the news websites, sending personal emails, doing online shopping and so on. I can semi-justify reading the headlines as work: I really need to know what's going on to do my role properly. But I work 40-50 hours per week (I do timesheets: the organisation knows exactly how many working hours it's getting from me every week), I'm on call for extra hours on top of that in the evenings and weekends, and I have a job that requires me to think. Thinking properly needs downtime. My boss wouldn't bat an eyelid if he came in and found me on Ebay, unless I was buying something particularly outre.

I think it was Bertrand Russell who reckoned we were capable of doing 4 hours of real brain-work per day. That fits with my experience.

With the people I manage, I try to treat them like competent adults who can manage their own workloads: I wouldn't criticise unless the work wasn't getting done.

When I'm at work, I'm rushed off my feet from beginning to end and sometimes beyond. Most days, having enough time to stop and eat something would be nice - where do people find the time to surf the internet etc?

Obviously not everyone does the same job as you, RunYouJuiceBitch

Haven't rtft but no YANBU

Most of the people I work with do life admin, shopping etc during work hours. My company are pragmatic enough to know we all need to do life admin from time to time but as long as we're doing our work too who cares.

Saying it's bad management is highly objective. Many top companies these days focus highly on relaxed work environments and employee satisfaction. Because happy employees are productive employees. You also attract better talent if you are seen as a good company to work for (i.e. you don't moan about a bit of internet browsing every day).

Assuming a company wants to employ and keep the best workers in their industry, it's better to pay a salary to have them produce quality work within the timeframes the company demands (whether that's by working 8 hours a day, 6 hours a day, 4 hours at night, working weekends and taking off mondays, or whatever) than to pay them for a set 8 hours a day and strictly monitor/regulate how they spend that time.

"decided to give up engaging as some people can’t understand that not all jobs and not all industries are the same."

I think they understand it, but they just don't like it.

It depends a lot on the job, but as long as the work is being done on schedule, there's nothing at all wrong with amusing yourself in between times. In my days of office work, I would often spend hours reading books etc because there was nothing to do. I would be waiting for someone else to finish something and hand it over to me, a lot of the time, But there were some days of non-stop work, staying till 9pm, etc. that was the nature of the job.

As a senior manager I trust my team to work remotely and responsibly. Sometimes they will need to work until 10pm, leave home at 6am or be away overnight. But sometimes they will need to get a haircut, watch their child's school play or take their dog for a walk. As long as they are available within core hours and deliver the results then I have no problem with downtime during work hours. It's give and take, not clocking in and out.

Depends on the internet policy
I would be careful not to be in breach of it as I have seen that used as an excuse to get rid of people in a downturn

Of course I have discussed with my manager the team workload and that we are probably over staffed by about one person in total during the working day, others in my team have some capacity too.

His reaction was like, “that’s great that you have capacity to deal with urgent matters without it impacting the rest of your work.”

"I understand the concept of being paid to work certain hours and actually working during those hours."

Then you don't understand the job that the OP - or other salaried professionals - do. You aren't paid to work certain hours, you are paid to do a job! And you often don't have set hours, which is a double-edged sword - on the one hand, you have the freedom to do your online shopping at 1pm, but on the other hand you might be working until 1am for a week to meet a deadline. I'm studying at the moment, but my last job had precisely this quid pro quo. That's why people do senior jobs - hard work, sometimes long hours, but also autonomy and flexibility. All this talk of 'ask your boss' and 'you're not paid to lark around' fundamentally misunderstand the kind of job the OP is doing. If you haven't worked in that kind of environment and don't know how it operates, then you really aren't qualified to tell her what is ok or not.

And yes, in skills shortage professions, where hiring is expensive, companies want to keep their talent on board! A lot of companies can't find sufficiently skilled employees for love or money. If they started kicking people out for surfing the internet during the day, despite doing their jobs exceedingly well, all that talent would get very quickly snapped up by their more sensible competitors, leaving them with nobody to staff their company!!

What frogsoup said.

I spent some time today surfing the net. But we have a deadline to meet and now have rewrites to do so I'll be working tonight until they are done. We don't make widgets or make coffee, it's a different kind of work - just responsibilities to do what needs to get done like adults.

I prefer to take a relaxed approach to my job. I am in the office usually about 36 to 38 hours a week. If I pulled out all the stops and worked diligently all the time I could probably do my job in 33 or so hours. But I like taking a break morning and afternoon and an hour for lunch. And doing the odd bit of shopping on line in between. My company doesn't care so long as the work is done.

YANBU. You have the kind of job where you don't have set hours; you work the hours needed to get the job done. That means working extra hours when it's busy and fewer hours when it's not busy. If there aren't tasks to be done* then why shouldn't you be allowed to do lifemin/MN.

*there is a grey area around non urgent tasks. Arguably you should get on with these as soon as you have any spare work time. Personally I think that's unrealistic.

Your husband needs to contribute more around the house and let you relax in the evenings.

This is normal in a salaried job, as people have said.
It's not my field, but I have done jobs where one is "on call" and so sometimes there was nothing pressing to do, and I was making handmade Christmas cards at work. My boss was merely entertained.

I spent my teens traveling one weekend a month to visit family (which is what the OP's averages out to) and I had to do my homework in the car on a Saturday morning and finish it on the way home on a Sunday afternoon. It was just normal for us. It's not a wrong way of managing relationships with family - my main frustration as a child was not being able to join orchestra etc at the weekend because they wouldn't accept that degree of absence from rehearsals.
YANBU OP.

I think you should. I remember once complaining to my aunt about getting home, grabbing a £2 pizza and going to bed, no time to even cook, never mind have downtime, her attitude was "suck it up". I was also pregnant at the time.

I was a headhunter in professional services for nearly ten years

You still have no idea what the OP does, or what all the posters on here who have said it’s normal in our profession do.

"often things kick off i do need to work late into the evening, and sometimes at weekends"

I didn't realise this was the case. For a Finance Manager, who works for a law firm. Why are they expecting so much?

Why are they expecting so much?

All the lawyers work very long hours, and often need last minute information on costs of cases etc, or have Finance related queries. The culture is very much that the support team needs to be very helpful and responsive at all times. We often need to liaise with the billing/budgeting teams of clients who are based all over the world so there is also the time difference issue.

Your husband needs to contribute more around the house and let you relax in the evenings.

My husband does nursery drop off, pick up, cooks dinner, then he needs to catch up on work because he isn’t booking enough hours (due to nursery run). He also does much more than half of the driving at weekends. He does contribute when he has a spare minute, but he gets no downtime at home either. Can’t remember the last time either of us watched TV on a weeknight! I have it much easier than him because I have the ‘downtime’ at work, he rarely does