Use the buddy system. Years ago I had a work-friend, we’d just book meetings with each other a couple of times a week, go to a meeting room and just hang out, I taught him to juggle, or we’d watch an episode from a series etc.

It was fun feeling like we got away with something, but realistically nobody questioned it because we both got our work done and it was a good company where that mattered more than time spent at a desk.

I go from one place to another, greet people, talk, drink coffee, have a snack, go to the toilet, etc, etc. They are pushing working from the office more and more saying it’s better for connecting with colleagues, so I go to and do that.

Play BitBurner, use Links browser.

Make jokes about not being busy. Make them boldly in slightly non appropriate circles. Then lean with the same amount of conviction into compliments. Agree with full heart, be non apologetic with the same force used to joke about how little work you have.

This duality is powerful because on the one hand you clearly have nothing to hide, and on the other hand you’re painfully truthful. Works a charm. Then go have brunch on the clock.

I’m seldom observed, and I just wear my headset all the time and pretend I’m answering the phone if my boss comes along. I do surveys for money on my phone when I have down time. Made 5K over the last few years and haven’t paid for anything on Amazon since I began.

Where are people finding these stereotypical office jobs that allow for so much downtime? In every office I’ve worked in, the calls and tickets would just keep coming in non-stop. I was always too busy to have time to look like I’m busy.

Terminal -> vim with syntax hilighting -> some source code. Passerbys won’t know what your code is for or what it’s supposed to do, but it’ll make you look busy and you can tinker with your own projects.

A friend of mine has a highly complex spreadsheet open at all times at work. He’s a D&D DM and uses that sheet to easily calculate price fluctuations in finished goods based on changes in resource price.

keep typing

Gawd I’m so glad I work in a factory.

Y’all’s jobs sound fucking awful lol

I mostly wfh so not really a problem anynore. However, I had a trick from before covid. My companies av is trash, it scans any new files created with a single thread, there’s a exception for the directory we compile in (although it’s frequently failing and scanning anyway 🙄) but I keep a repo outside that directory for when I want make my compile take 6hours instead of 10minutes. I also have this as my screensaver

jerking off. nobody bothers a man who is jerking off.

At my last company, we would walk around with our laptops. People would just assume we were looking for a meeting room or had something important to do.

I can’t quite remember what we did at our desks specifically. However, I do remember a guy I worked with used to browse Wikipedia and Tinder.

Main “trick” I can share is kind of dependent on the fact that I work in IT / software dev / cyber security and use Linux as my daily driver. I’ve either always been able to talk my boss into letting me use Linux OR I’ve been the one in charge of giving people computers and creating / enforcing whatever policies OR I had one boss who was like “You use Linux! Awesome! Smart people use Linux! I should Linux! Teach me oh master!” Even the one place I worked where they were like “We need you to use Windows” they were also like “Sure! Use linux for internal software dev / dev ops stuff, but if you’re doing project management work for customers or handling customer data, you need to do that on your Windows computer.” So I got a second computer and put Linux on it.

Any slacking off (Reddit / Lemmy / Minecraft / Netflix / etc) is on the Linux computer, on the second to last virtual desktop. A bunch of legitimate work is on the other desktops and (and if there’s a second computer, on that computer) at all times. If my boss came in to look at what I was doing, one mouse click or hot key and my whole screen is whatever I’m supposed to be working on.

The other trick is "Schedule stuff in your calendar, even if it’s just placeholders. I used to put “Engineer Time” in all the time, big blocks of it. Just make sure you’re closing enough tickets / pushing enough code / documenting enough progress. I also used to put placeholders for meetings with clients / vendors / whatever that were unconfirmed. Then instead of cancelling the meetings when I actually scheduled something, I would put a note like “Client rescheduled” in the meeting notes.

Im the sole IT guy at a non profit. I could probably have a movie playing, but if power shell is open I’m covered. It’s hilarious and glorious.

Have a look at online courses. w3school, udemy, coursera have IT related courses if that’s your thing, there are other sites that have online courses too. Free ebooks at gutenberg.org that you can download or read online. Do a search for “text only news”, find a site you like, catch up on the daily news; just looks like a page of text from a distance.