WFH - do you ever just relax?

[ringoffiire]

I love working from home, and when I do, I will quite often do half a day's work and then put my feet up.

I do everything I need to do, and I do it to a good standard. My manager praises me and has no concerns at all about my work. I'm not behind at all.

But if I've done all my work, I simply leave Teams active so that I hear if anyone wants to contact me, and then I get on with whatever I want to do.

If I was in the office, I would still be sat there doing nothing, but just feeling frustrated that I had to look like I was busy until 5.

Right now I'm sipping a delicious beverage at 4pm and browsing mumsnet, because I've finished all my work.

Anyone else? And do you think it's OK?

Based on your comments both to OP and @SleepingBooty ,it's becoming apparent that if you worked on your comprehension, and made a concerted effort to be less deliberately obtuse about everything, maybe you could get your work done a bit faster too.

It's very odd.

The concept that tasks might not be automatically available and suitable to fill a particular quiet time for a worker isn't a complicated one. Someone having two hours with nothing much to do, or ten minutes, doesn't make a two hour or ten minute task automatically appear for them. In particular, it doesn't mean their colleagues or managers suddenly become available to devise something.

I'm the same. I've got ADHD. I work in a team with the same work load. I get mine done in about 3/4 of the time of everyone else to a high standard. I can just work really hard and fast for a few hours. Everyone else seems to either!

I WFH when not seeing patients (nurse).My ledger has to be fully or I'd get called out by my team.I never have a minute and work constantly.My day flies by.However when I'm at home and not the office I love that I can put the washing on in my lunchbreak or watch 15 mins of TV.I worked in an office for a few months when I was thinking of leaving nursing and found myself trying to find something to do, doing pointless jobs to fill the day.I found it so boring and the day was so long.Honestly I prefer it to be busy like my current job.

I rarely get any free time in the working day, but I might put the washing on or empty the dishwasher between calls. My work load never ends. Nothing is ever really finished so there is always plenty to do. I can’t imagine ever running out of work!

Yanbu, mind a bit blown by having no work left to do, would never happen in my job! Enjoy yourself I say 😁

@TisTheDarnSeason

Such odd, old-fashioned ideas on this thread. Can some of you really not envisage a job where the work ebbs and flows sometimes? We're not all Bob Cratchits bent over our desks scratching away until the boss says we can leave.

Totally agree. A lot of white collar work is project based and it can be feast or famine. I can have days when I have a deadline looming when I work from 6am to 8pm and then others where I'm able to knock off at 3.30pm and go for a walk with my DD for a couple of hours. I've never "done" the work because there are tons of long-form projects with long lead times and the work is never finished, but I can get to a point where I have a sufficient grasp of it to chill for a bit. My managers trust me to deliver what I do when I need to do it and (thankfully) don't usually mither me if I've logged off at 5.56pm.

I work hard enough on the "hard work" days (including sometimes working weekends and evenings) that I'm fucked if I'm beating myself up about taking a short break when I need one. Anyone who fails to understand that clearly doesn't have much of a grasp of how projects are managed.

Much like @SleepingBooty I came from a hugely stressful job with (unnecessarily long) office hours but my current role is fully remote and could easily be done PT. I would love to move to a 4 day week and it would t impact my role or effectiveness one jot. Sadly pay is pretty dire otherwise I'd just ask to drop a day.

Some days I do get bored but the fact I can collect my kids if needed, walk my dog and do chores around my day is not worth a bigger salary right now. In a few years when DC are more independent and puppy isn't so labour intensive I will look to move and consider a hybrid role but right now my 4-5 hours work a day stretched over 8 suits me well.

😂 no

I bill my time by the hour, I need to account for my time and my clients won't pay for me to put my feet up.

If I chill on Mumsnet I need to make up the time.

Yes, I do this. My workload naturally ebbs and flows both over the course of a day and over the course of a year. I also work across multiple timezones so the work doesn't always happen in UK 9-5 hours. Doing my work in a single daily block of 8 hours makes no sense for my role and it's not tracked by my company.

On an "average" day I'll check my emails and deal with stuff that's happened overnight first thing, way earlier than I would if I had to travel to an office. Then I'll probably get some downtime in the day to exercise or relax in between the work that needs to be done.

My company is also aware of burnout and the need to recharge, so in quiet weeks we're pretty much encouraged to take it easy and just be around in case of urgent stuff, because the flipside of that are the weeks where the whole team is flat out all day.

@Thepeopleversuswork my job sounds a bit like yours but I don't think that's the same thing as the OP's situation.

It doesn't sound like hers is a an ebb and flow thing, at all, it sounds all ebb and no flow!

Also contrary to the posters who seem weirdly fixated on time spent in front of a screen, taking downtime unquestionably helps me do my job better. I'm paid partly to have creative ideas and those are more likely to come if I go for a run to clear the cobwebs, or even just go and stand in the garden to get away from my desk, than if I'm staring at my screen watching emails come in. In the less creative aspect of my job, if there's a really knotty problem I can't figure out, the answer is always to step away from it and think about something else.

It does ebb and flow. There are busier periods where I do have enough work to fill the day and of course I do everything required.

But then it can go weeks at a time without, as it is at the moment.

So are there days when you work longer than usual working hours?

Or just some days when you work your hours?

I think what people like @Thepeopleversuswork are doing is - some weeks they might work 45 hours and some weeks 30 hours. So it roughly balances out and they are trusted to set their schedule. My job is like that. But - sorry if I have misunderstood - but it doesn't sound like you ever work longer than usual working hours

I worked from home some years and never stopped. I had to prioritise my time in the morning to ensure I focused on the most important tasks, and deadlines. At most I might put the washing machine on at lunchtime. I was promoted often as a result.

It's very rare.

I do have this on my desk 😉.

To be fair to the posters that cannot comprehend a job that isn't full on all the time but the business owners want to have their staff on hand, I really struggled with it too at the beginning of this role when we were office based. I made myself busy reorganising every corner of the office/ filing cabinets and online servers. Turns out they were happy for us to chat/ watch netflix/ play games until an email/ call comes in to action. It was fab when the DC were small and I could nip out to their assemblies/ class presentations etc. We actually had a period of almost a year when we sold the main business and before we invested in a new business, that really was boring clock watching. I took on a qualification in that time.

*(V. small profitable family business that has been going since 1947). We now have the autonomy to run our own depts as we see fit as long as the work is completed promptly.

Totally. I used to work for a large international news organisation and on my first week there one of the big bosses (a hoary old bloke who must have been in his 70s) took me aside and said you need to have a break of about 20 minutes once every 3 or so hours or your productivity will fall off a cliff and I will come and call you out and make you do it. He used to warn us not to become "desk zombies". And he would go round a couple of times a day and prod the junior reporters to get away from their desks for a bit.

A walk, a coffee, just something to get you away from a screen and get out of your head for a bit. I haven't smoked for 25 years but smoking breaks served a useful purpose here too despite the unhealthiness: its just enough time to get you away from the desk, outside in the air and just flip the switch in your brain a bit.

Sitting at your desk glued to emails for eight hours a day without any kind of reset is not good time management.

I have sympathy for people in call centres or other jobs where their toilet breaks are monitored. It's completely inhuman and no one should have to work like this. But it doesn't mean that the rest of us are taking the piss.

@hawaiiantropico I'm actually not working today (as in, it's a non-working day).

YANBU - less interruptions, more able to concentrate. Get so much more done at home than the office, we are hybrid mostly by choice. I like going in to the office, but we get nothing done!

I'm sure boss' car needs cleaned or something. How dare you have a non working day?

😂I'll get on that, pronto.

April is a quiet month for us at work, March is absolutely mental where I have more than enough work to keep me busy but even so I have ebbs and flows when it comes to my own productivity.
Mornings I tend to be very focused and deal with anything urgent and most pressing, afternoons I can breathe a bit and mostly it’s long project type of stuff that I chip away at (it’s just how I choose to manage my own time). I have a week off this week and my inbox was totally empty when I left, the end of last week I was twiddling my thumbs a bit - so I just had an extra long lunchtime walk etc, as long as our work is completed no one breathes down our necks and I appreciate it.
I don’t tend to stray from my desk though, I like to deal with anything that comes in asap so nothing starts building up.
I have a colleague that literally has hundreds and hundreds of emails in her inbox, when I’m bored I ask her to send me some of her stuff so I can help her, I hate having nothing to do!

taking downtime unquestionably helps me do my job better

Absolutely. More than half my job involves writing and generating ideas, in some format or another. The best and most creative ideas are rarely prompted by being sat on my backside staring at a computer screen!

Me too. I barely give myself time for lunch WFH.