How much work do you do at work?

Olajuwon

For those with an office at work, after performing your typical daily tasks, how much time do you spend relaxing and surfing the internet at work? Are you always busy? Are you not busy most of the time?

blargoe

How busy I am varies from day to day. One day I'm not doing crap and other days I'm grinding away all day, working through lunch, and staying late. You can usually tell what kind of day I'm having by seeing how much I post on this site

Olajuwon

blargoe wrote:

How busy I am varies from day to day. One day I'm not doing crap and other days I'm grinding away all day, working through lunch, and staying late. You can usually tell what kind of day I'm having by seeing how much I post on this site

It's the same for me. Some days there is nothing to do, other days I am being pulled from all directions. I can say, I do real work 2 out of 5 days a week.

EdTheLad

Yes i like to call it the calm before the storm.Unfortunately its the nature of our business, i've actually gone afew months without a single task, but once you start getting used to the quite times a new crisis begins.

garv221

I like the "Calm before the storm" idea.
It really dpends how busy someone is by how much they know. I run my dept and do my job very well. When issues occur, I already know what has happended to cause the problem and have laready begun the process of resolving it. So I have a quick turn around and don't spend to much time fixing a problem where someone else would spent an entire day and "look busy". Thats my arguement for co-workers, if you see me enjoying my day at the office while your struggling to meet deadlines, its simply because I spent massive amounts of hours learning my field and taking work home with me while you were punched out at happy hour. Its like Radio Shack - You have questions, I have answers.

Gabe7055

Where I work is kind of like a firehouse we just sit around and wait for something to break. I would say I work 4 out of 8 hours a day. But than again things can turn ugly quickly and before you know it leaving work at around 8:00pm Just the nature of the game I suppose.

I spend most of my free time studying or talking to my boss.

reloaded

Well, I've been working second shift here recently, so I sit on my bum surfing the web about 6.5 hours out of my nine. The other 2.5 hours are spent either studying for certs, fixing connectivity issues, or calling end users to make sure they're getting their data so that I can close my tickets.

The thing that many people don't understand about IT is that if I am doing absolutely nothing on the job, that means all the systems I support are up and operational and people are getting their data. If I'm running around fixing stuff, that's bad.

12thlevelwarrior

I am neck deep in a project I really enjoy working on, so I am always busy lately, but when things are slack, I always use idle time to study for certs. Of course I surf some as well.

Danman32

reloaded wrote:

Well, I've been working second shift here recently, so I sit on my bum surfing the web about 6.5 hours out of my nine. The other 2.5 hours are spent either studying for certs, fixing connectivity issues, or calling end users to make sure they're getting their data so that I can close my tickets.

The thing that many people don't understand about IT is that if I am doing absolutely nothing on the job, that means all the systems I support are up and operational and people are getting their data. If I'm running around fixing stuff, that's bad.

That's known as a self defeating job.

ITNYC

Depending on the day... sometimes i just end up going online on a laptop but somedays.. ugh! just a sh!t load of work to do. The BEST! days are the days that there is nothing to do but go online, Friday and Pay day,..going home at 4:45. but rarely happens.

SRTMCSE

Man I wish I had projects, most of time I sit back and do all the projects I can do with the zero budget I have. Other than that I deal with any minor user issues or service provider issues that may arise.

Trailerisf

I run from client to client all day long... Its nice billing 13-15 hrs in a day and being home by 6 :P

/usr

It was actually refreshing to read this post. I thought that I was just lazy, honestly, but now I see this scenario seems to be common among IT workers.

Like all of you, there are days where I'm running around from the time I step foot in the door, to the time I leave. Other days, I come in and literally sit without a call.

I've learned so much from Wikipedia...

strauchr

Yes it is certainly the nature of our industry.

For me it depends what project I am on (and what country I am in). At the moment I can go through an entire week with doing absoloutely nothing because a lot of what I have to do relies on things other people need to do and they don't do them. Other times I have been on projects that were well over resourced and badly managed.

Project before this I spent from 8am until nearly the last tube home (midnight) on a project that required heaps of in hous and out of hours work. As well as weekend. Badly under resourced project but I battled through it and am taking my current project as a break.

Compared to Perth though I have never seen such a bunch of slack buggars. When something needs to be done it gets done in Perth (with all 8 companies I worked for). With 3 companies, and testimonies from other friends, Londoners are slack as by comparison.

While this is fine because I am kina on holiday as well I don't get stressed out from it. But then I have some serious de-skilling going on right now and it will take a bit to bounce back.

Megadeth4168

The Nature of I.T.
Some days are so busy that we are like
and all we want to do is go home and

Some days our clients respect and us
and makes the hard days worth it.

Then there are the days where there isnt much to do except to
and the client has to about what it is you actually do.
When they think all you are is a
it makes you feel

In the end though, you know and they know that you are
and without you they all might as well be
because they know that would be the onyl way they could deal
with their PC issues.

Danman32

I love that! That reminds me of the status reports one of the guys I worked with in my previous job would write when he discovered icons.

garv221

/usr wrote:

It was actually refreshing to read this post. I thought that I was just lazy, honestly, but now I see this scenario seems to be common among IT workers.

I thought the same.