To do almost nothing at work

[TooInvested]

I finished uni a couple of years ago and am going back in September to do a further course relevant to the industry I want to work in. I have done an admin temp job for a year and a bit and just started a new one. In both, but especially the one I’ve just started, there seems to be almost nothing for me to do-the first role was office based so I helped other colleagues and managed to find just about enough stuff to do to fill the time, but I did spend quite a lot of time pretending to look busy. I told my boss regularly I could do with more work and he would give me a task that would take maybe 30 mins. I didn’t want to mention I wasn’t busy too much though so I didn’t lose the job. When I started wfh due to covid I did less and less and spent a lot of time watching tv with my laptop.
The job I’ve just started is a mix of office and home work and I honestly don’t know why they’ve hired me. I was in the office for the last 2 weeks and was fairly busy but I’m fairly sure I completed the task they hired me to do which was supposed to take at least 3 months. It seems my job now is just to email 3 people occasionally to remind them to do part of their job/fill in some forms that I can’t fill in. I’ve been working from home this week and have done embarrassingly little-but there seems to be almost nothing for me to do. I’ve messaged my manager and another colleague saying “I’m doing this at the moment and nearly done is there anything else you’d like me to do” and they either haven’t replied or have told me to do something that they must know takes about 10 mins. I have to go into the office for the rest of the week and I have no clue what I’ll do-I’m saving a small task I could do today so I can do it there slowly and look busy. I’m sat in my garden in the lovely sun now and feel quite guilty-but also isn’t it my manager’s responsibility to give me work to do (especially if I specifically ask for more work) and to check I’m being productive? I’m not interested in this industry and I doubt I’ll need a reference from them and am leaving in August-I wouldn’t mind that much if the contract was cut short as I’m just here for some extra money. So is it unreasonable to avoid mentioning to them how little I have to do and coast along till August? I would actually prefer to be busier but I’m worried if I keep pointing out that there’s not much to do they’ll just get rid of me.
Since I’ve found both temp office jobs I’ve done to have a very light workload-I was wondering-is it normal for office juniors/admin people to have very little to do and is there actually tons of people in offices everywhere all pretending to be busy? (Genuine question and no offence meant to any people who do work in admin and have busy roles). At my last company, there seemed to be far too many admin people all not doing a great deal.

@callmemaybee

I work in public sector and will take home £2500 June payday…I can assure u that I have done nothing to earn that. I am literally on conference calls all day which could have easily been an email!

But being on a conference call, unless you're sitting there in silence and not participating is doing something work related.

I can spend weeks turning up at work, pootling around the internet and doing SFA to do with work.

I probably work around the equivalent of a day a month.

But being on a conference call, unless you're sitting there in silence and not participating is doing something work related

It doesn't mean it adds any value though. I used to get invited to so many pointless meetings, my input was not needed and although an overall awareness of the project was useful, I didn't benefit from hearing all of the ins and outs. At the time I was a contractor as I wanted to make money for a deposit, and I calculated by my hourly price how much these meetings I have zero useful input into were costing them (it was a lot). They stopped, and now I'm in a permanent job as an employee, we still make sure there arent loads of people going for the sake of it.

@Slipperrr
Unproductive busy work is demoralising be as well but doesn't compete with the level of boredom that no meetings, no emails, nothing to do at all has.

I worked in an NHS job where I can promise you I did NOTHING. I very occasionally processed a couple of forms, which took 10 mins max. I begged for more work, but no one had anything to give me. I left after 6 months because it was beyond tedious. Sometimes I would walk around the hospital to break tge day up. That was my third, and last job in the NHS doing admin. All 3 were varying degrees of doing not much at all. During my time there I remember sitting opposite a woman who used to print out copies of a flyer for educational courses and put it into about 300+ envelopes each week. I asked why not just email it in a mailshot?? She got very flustered and narky over it, because basically it was tge only thing she did each week ...so don't believe all NHS workers are rushed off their feet!

I worked for the local council a couple of years ago. I was always busy but the managers regularly turned up at 10, finished at 3 and spent a large proportion of the day online shopping and browsing the net.
It’s disgusting how much money was wasted on them
OP yanbu there’s nothing else you can realistically do

@hopelessbusiness

I think anyone asking where these jobs can be found need to look at their local councils! I recently worked for mine and was staggered at how little there was to do! 8hrs work could easily be done in 1, everybody complaining about how busy they are (!!!) and so much time wasted on bureaucracy, endless pointless teams calls, and Covid related nonsense! Stuck it for 3 months, completed an online course and found another job. I have work to do now and love it!!

Gosh this is so shocking and sooo wasteful to be just coasting along.

Sad this is what we pay our council taxes for when there is soo much needs doing on our streets, environment, care facilities, waste facilities etc etc... and we are wasting money paying for under-utilised employees.
Why is it happening do you think? I couldn't in all conscience continue in a job like that, it would be demoralising.

@Slipperrr

But being on a conference call, unless you're sitting there in silence and not participating is doing something work related

It doesn't mean it adds any value though. I used to get invited to so many pointless meetings, my input was not needed and although an overall awareness of the project was useful, I didn't benefit from hearing all of the ins and outs. At the time I was a contractor as I wanted to make money for a deposit, and I calculated by my hourly price how much these meetings I have zero useful input into were costing them (it was a lot). They stopped, and now I'm in a permanent job as an employee, we still make sure there arent loads of people going for the sake of it.

Fair point.

I’m in Goldilocks position of having a busy and challenging job BUT totally manageable

I have been where the OP is at in a previous job. It just made life feel so slow and sluggish during the week. I’d start the week with literally no motivation because I knew nothing was waiting for me.

Now, I begin the week thinking “ok, so this this and this needs to be done”. But certainly time for a nice lunch breaks and a few coffee station chats!

I have days like this in my job. My workload is very variable so I can be rushed off my feet one week and have barely anything to do the next. The having to look busy thing is very stressful, particularly as I share an office with my boss.

"But being on a conference call, unless you're sitting there in silence and not participating is doing something work related."

Sitting there in silence and not participating but listening is also working, unless you do what many people do on Zoom, which is to turn their camera off an do something else instead.

"Its irrelevant how she got the job or when she got the job. She was being paid to be an office administrator and was supposed to be able to do simple tasks like copy and paste from a database to a word document..."

It is relevant if she started before computers as those tasks would not be in her contract/job description.

@Gwenhwyfar

"Its irrelevant how she got the job or when she got the job. She was being paid to be an office administrator and was supposed to be able to do simple tasks like copy and paste from a database to a word document..."

It is relevant if she started before computers as those tasks would not be in her contract/job description.

It is relevant.bevaise no-one has "must be able to copy and paste between documents" on their JD.

But "able to use Microsoft/computers etc" would be.

I am finding this all hilarious considering that in a thread I started about whether anyone sits at their computer for 7-8 hours straight everyday when WFH, I was repeatedly told how lazy and irresponsible I was for wanting to go for a walk during the working day to keep myself from going insane!!
www.mumsnet.com/Talk/work/4279028-Anyone-else-have-to-clock-in-out-when-working-from-home

@brokenkettle typical hypocritical mumsnetters 😂

I had a job like this for a couple of years in my early 20s. Local college hired me to update website, but it was a bought package website, all the design was done for me, I just had to update new course information from time to time, and news (this was pre social media so no Facebook, Twitter, Instagram). Job took me about 5 hours a week. I had my own office and a salary of £18k, which was decent in the early noughties.

I was super keen early on, trying to fill my day and try new extra things. I got the graphic design dept to teach me photoshop, so I could make sure all the images I uploaded were great. Over time they tried to implement an intranet system, and I was trained and ready for that, but there was a merger with a bigger college on the horizon and I could see it would be obsolete before it was ever used by staff. Merger rumbled on over about an eighteen month period and everyone kept their jobs during that time. Weird period. I used to sleep in my office and spent a lot of the day photoshopping pictures of my mates to amuse myself.

I left just before merger to do PGCE. I was tired of living at home with my folks and ready to move in with boyfriend, now DH.

Provided you've raised it and offered to do more then I'd just leave it and do your own thing (but stay online/contactable). I am now in a super-busy job which is far better, but in my temping days sometimes I did nothing at all. It's difficult, I didn't like it as I prefer to be busy so the time flies by. But if you are going to Uni think about a couple of short courses such as improve your essay writing or statistics analysis (depending on what you will study).

The OP and PP also brought memories, I once worked at the Dept. of Health and Social Security all summer as a temp. When I asked for a full list of numbers (I was operating a switchboard) I was told "Oh I just chuck them through to a random number if I don't know what to do with them, someone will eventually help". I was also asked to not clear the entire workload as it "would make the real secretary look bad". Honestly it was awful - I did get a full list of numbers and clear the backlog of course, but it didn't win me any friends.

It never ceases to amaze me how poorly some companies plan their time or even seem unaware of the amount of work that is (or isn’t!) going on. Case in point: two admin / reception / PA type jobs I had, which couldn’t have been more different.

Job 1: there was so little to do that I literally used to make myself perform every task at about half the speed it actually took - like physically moving in slow motion - so as to spin things out for longer. We weren’t supposed to browse the Internet (though there were ways to get away with it) so I spent most of my time planning my then upcoming wedding. I probably re-did the seating plan and tinkered with the formatting of the Order of Service about 100 times each! Eventually I asked to go part-time as I was going crazy. Figured I could just about make the job last 2.5 days a week. But oh no, the boss agreed to me reducing my hours but decided he still needed someone there full-time (for what?) so decided to get a job share!! So now there were two of us doing half a job between us.

Job 2: they told me in the interview that the phone didn’t ring very often. In reality, it rang non-stop, and between that and the million & one other things I was supposed to be doing, there were days when I would be absolutely desperate for the loo but simply didn’t have time to go. I would run around the office because it was just so crazy busy.

I’ve often found with temping jobs that they’ll hire you to do something which they think will take a week, and I’d have finished it by lunchtime on the first day. I had to learn not to go and ask ‘What shall I do now?’ because they have no idea and it just annoys them.

My DF once wrote a script for an entire 6-episode TV show while ‘working’ in a job where he’d finished sorting out whatever it was they’d hired him to sort, and didn’t want to tell them! Yes, the show was a satirical comedy about the industry in question. Sadly it never got made. And yes they found out eventually and made him redundant but it was good while it lasted!