How do you occupy yourself on slow days at the office?

I go for an extended lunch and cook some pan fried chicken legs with back attached. No one noticed me gone.

What you are experiencing is what just about what every new employee goes through at some point. The challenge is two-fold. Part One is that there is rarely a proper training program designed. Part Two is that, if there is one, it isn’t customized.

Based upon what has been described, it sounds as if you may need to ‘manage up’. It’s a matter of scheduling time with the direct report and putting together an action plan. How detailed and frequently to meet for updates is a matter to work out between the two of you.

I float around the halls in the evening, scaring the poor janitors.

Why is it that every time I post a “just for fun” type of question, people think I’m asking for advice? I’m working for a single attorney – down time is inevitable. I don’t mind it, and it’ll be over once they give me another attorney.

Just for fun, people!

I kept a list of things that need doing, and when I had no work to do, I would try to knock out what I could.

My last job was mainly call center, and we had a whole slow season, during which I had to remain at my desk in case calls came in, but there was literally nothing else to do.

I got a Hulu Plus membership, and watched all four (or six…whatever) seasons of Battlestar Galactica, all of Firefly, the first season of The Following and a few Korean horror films, without ever missing beat in my workload.

Edit: Oh, yeah, and Vikings.

Like this.

Fluther, FB, check e-mail; rinse, repeat.

Fluther, Tiny Death Star, Kindle, Scramble with Friends, What’s The Phrase, online shopping, web surfing.

I once had a job with the highway department. My duties involved testing samples mostly. I spent a majority of my time in a lab at the back of the parking lot, alone. While samples were processing, I had a lot of down time. Initially, I busied myself with cleaning. That soon became overdone. A mouse started coming in from the neighboring field. I thought I should deter it, but I didn’t want to kill it. I set up an elaborate obstacle course to slow it down, with a spot planned for capture. It worked. As I carried it out by the tail, I explained that the lab was for me, and the field was for him.
The next day, exactly the same time, he was back. I still had the obstacles in place, so I got him. Repeat for about a week. I had to change things around then, because he knew the course too well. It continued until one day, I was sick. I was staring at the wall, wishing the day were over. Behind me I heard, “SQUEEK!”. When I turned, he was on his hind legs staring at me. I yelled at him to get out. He did. The next day, it was business as usual.

Fluther, FB, email, work email, New York Times online, read blogs (craft blogs mostly), Pinterest, googling things I am curious about, online shopping. Mostly that. Sometimes chatting with coworkers, sometimes doing crafts (decoupage, making cards, holiday crafts). Writing greeting cards to people.

Pretty much just what you did today is what I do supplemented with Pinterest, making grocery lists and menu plans for the next few days, updating my social calendar, looking busy with the occasional trial transcript in case the boss wanders down to my area, back to my iPad for some more Kindle reading, clean out my desk drawers, straighten up the front counter, undertake a serious caffeine search to keep myself awake during the final hour, and then at 5:00, I watch the dead come back to life and I swim with the other lemmings out the door to my much needed weekend!! Happy Friday, friends!

@VS I do grocery lists and recipe searching, too!

I used to try to start a project that fixes whatever I think is wrong with the part of the company that I understand.

Everyone complains. Complaining with a possible solution already thought through and planned shows you actually care.

Failing that, try to learn something from someone smarter than myself. They’re probably bored too.

Add to my above list clean out my pocketbook and wallet. Count my cash. Organize my office and desk. Make a shopping list.

My last job like that I got a book on Excel. Bonus, It looked like I was working while I was actually studying. I am very good at Excel now.

Oh, yeah. My company had a Lynda.com membership. It was made available to use for anything that could help with our workload, but I wasn’t really interested in watching videos on Microsoft Word… so I learned GIMP instead.

@funkdaddy Nope, I’m the only one in the office with any down time. All the assistants have two or three attorneys, so they’re quite busy. And, in any other job, I’d offer to help them out, but that’s not really possible because each attorney is different and I’m only familiar with how my attorney wants things done. I’ll occasionally enter time for one of the ladies’ attorneys, but that’s really all she can let me do.

I’m really excited to be assigned another attorney. I want to be crazy busy all day too. One of the assistants that trained me told the office manager I’d be ready for a second attorney in no time. It usually takes longer to train legal assistants, I’m told.

@livelaughlove21 – I understand you’re averse to anything that appears to be advice here, so I apologize in advance, please just hear me out.

I provide IT for companies who don’t want to have someone full time, mostly that ends up being setting up their network and teaching people how to print envelopes (kidding). I have a couple law firms as clients. They’re typically worried about backing up their information and keeping meticulous records.

When anyone wants to know what someone has been doing online, if they’ve requested the capability, I can send them a report that looks something like this with about 15 minutes effort. I don’t even have to visit the office if it’s set up right. One firm occasionally requests those reports, sometimes that’s followed shortly by asking me to forward that person’s email to someone else and revoke their credentials. They’ve never said specifically anyone is fired for internet usage, but they’re lawyers, and I’d guess they build a case with whatever information they have. They can legally have all the information regarding anything that happened on their network.

That doesn’t even get into setting up alerts so someone gets an email when a site is accessed (say facebook.com), filtering for keywords (that’s why we label items NSFW here), or having a regular 90 day report on everyone. I try to steer people clear of things that will just breed mistrust. All are pretty easy to make happen though with the right hardware and software.

No advice, just information.

@funkdaddy Thanks for the warning, but I don’t go into NSFW questions or access any porn or social networking sites from my work computer. I’m not stupid. They also know I have a lot of down time, so I doubt they’d be surprised to find I was using my computer to shop, pay bills, and look up recipes. My attorney emails herself links to recipes every day from worrk.

Where I work, they use something called Websense, which is some kind of monitoring software. They don’t seem to go after people but they can.

@livelaughlove21: Realize that the company may feel like what is ok for the attorney is not ok for someone at your level, or they may decide that since you have a lot of downtime, you should fill it by doing some menial tasks, rather than online fun.

@jca I’ve been told multiple times to “surf the web” if I get bored. There’s no formal training program, so my boss would like me to be patient with them, as someone can’t be with me at all times teaching me new things and there’s no “busy work” to occupy myself with when my attorney doesn’t need me. On my first day, the office manager said, “only one computer here will connect to Facebook, but you can use the Internet at your discretion.” Once again, I don’t need advice here.

@livelaughlove21: If you were told to use the computer, then go for it.

Soooo sorry for giving you advice. You will find on Fluther that advice may come whether or not you want it. It’s not always possible, on Fluther, to tell people what kind of answers not to give.

Aside from my more or less flippant (even though accurate) response above, I’ve spent days – weeks, even – learning Excel functions in order to extract data from strings, do lookups and indexing functions, and to make very complicated – but easy-to-use – spreadsheets to enable proposal estimating (and later budgeting on contracts won) that give all kinds of information: total manpower, milestone schedules, cash flow tables and graphs, cost breakdown of the entire estimate / budget, manpower vs. schedule projections – all from simple entries on two data input sheets. And then I continued to work on my VBA skills to write macros to enable various displays, sorts, hiding irrelevant rows of the sheet for printing, etc.

If I were in your office with downtime, then one of the things I’d work on is my Word capabilities: I’d be practicing more with “styles”, document templates, table of contents / index / table of authorities functions – all of the cross-referencing functions, in fact – and also making documents that will be exported, but should not contain giveaway information that you don’t want clients and adversaries to have.

I’d certainly learn the ins and outs of the computer network there, to be (as I am where I am now) the local go-to guy who isn’t part of IT, but can talk to IT.

I’d also make databases – as I do now – to replace as many spreadsheets as possible. Spreadsheets are fun to play with and great at displaying data and summaries, but databases are a better way to collect and store the data in the first place, I think. For that reason in my spare time I’ve been working on building “a database of everything” that we do in our group of the company that I work for.

Sometimes I do Fluther at work to get away from the tasks that I’ve set for myself.

@CWOTUS: She made it clear that she does not want advice. See her response to my post above. Don’t you listen? LOL (sarcasm).

@jca “It’s not always possible, on Fluther, to tell people what kind of answers not to give.”

Sooo sorry for getting frustrated when every question I post asking for experiences from the collective, I instead receive advice I did not ask for and gave no indication that I needed. I must’ve missed the memo that I shouldn’t expect answers to my questions to, well, answer my question.

And I have no problem with the response by @CWOTUS, as he did share a personal experience.

Well i just listen to songs thro’ head set and do some discussions as i do now..:P i will also just try to concentrate on my work too since i have to show the report by the end of the day. But what if i suggest you some important and interesting facts regarding jobs and offers for you around your cities(may be) in US. http://localjobs.sulekha.com/philadelphia-metro-area, this is the platform which was telling you about. Something interesting. Go check.

I go home. It’s my office.