2024, Games, Uncategorized, work

Keeping Busy At Work

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I have worked in my present job for 25 years. They have been very good years on the whole. I am now getting ready retire from full time work to a part-time position in January. I will only work about 20 hours a week after I retire. Husband does this, having retired from the State about 10 years ago and working part-time ever since.

The bulk of my work has been doing psychological evaluations and individual/family therapy. I always schedule two evaluations a week and therapy clients wherever I can fit them in. The writing of reports takes up a good bit of my time, too. There is never any shortage of evaluations to do, and I will continue to do two a week even after I retire. Because my part-time job will only involve doing evaluations, I am in the process of finishing up with current therapy clients. I am not taking on any new ones. It would not be ethical to start with new therapy clients, only to transfer them to someone else after a couple of months. This has left me, for the first time, with the ability to get way ahead finishing my evaluation reports, with large spans of time during the day when I have nothing to do. In the old days, I was always finishing evaluation reports at the last minute due to not having enough free time during the work day to write.

I don’t like being bored. The next few months will only get more boring, I am afraid. I could plead ill health and just go home, but I think people would get suspicious if I took too much sick leave. (I have about 700 hours accrued.) I don’t want to retire before January 1, as I want to work full time for financial reasons.

I have been surreptitiously doing crosswords and other puzzles. I have more time to write blog posts at work than at home! My colleagues are all super busy, so I feel guilty looking idle. I don’t want to shut my office door, either. I just keep my desk covered with papers and try to look productive.

How do you handle being bored? What is the longest job you ever had? Any ideas how I can pass the time as I sit here?

25 thoughts on “Keeping Busy At Work”

  1. I retired six years ago. Left a life in Taiwan to take up something different, in Michigan. Lost what had become “home” to me after 39 years there, lost the opportunity to interact in one of the world’s most beautiful languages, lost a “status”, even lost my name. Nothing in retirement grabbed me to fill the empty hours. It was a shock.

    I tried crafts (but I’m not crafty). I tried writing (but had nothing to say that was worth anyone reading), I tried home repair (but eventually everything was either fixed or ruined). Then I hit on creating rhymed, metered verse and setting it to existing tunes in the public domain. I learned how to make .ppt shows with music in the background so that my stuff could be sung like Karaoke, and off the screen. I got a YouTube channel for distribution. BIG FLOP.

    I’m “churchy”, so the stuff I write for singing is the weekly lessons for reading on Sundays. I’ve mostly been rewriting the Psalms of late.

    Last February I began posting things musical staffs. The daily “views” at YouTube began to rise. I noticed that when I post the same song as a Karaoke video next to its companion in staffs, maybe 20 people will look at the staffs, and 2 will view the Karaoke.

    This keeps me occupied. That’s about all. It can be seen as fun (if you have a twisted sort of mind). This keeps me out of the fridge and away from the TV.

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  2. I had to come to terms with this issue early in my travel career when my then-boss wouldn’t grant me and a co-worker a comp day when we had come in to work of our own volition on Good Friday (this used to be a paid holiday at the company)

    It made me think long and hard about the job versus the time. As a salaried person, the assumption is that I was hired to do a job, not necessarily fill 40 hours on a timesheet. I worked hard for decades to get my job done in those 40 hours and sometimes less, while my colleagues tended to work way MORE.

    So as I was winding down to my retirement, I had the same issue you’re having… more unfilled time. I put up a sign in my cube (that mostly only I could see) that said “Not my circus, not my monkeys” and firm;y told myself that I was currently doing the job, even if it didn’t fill up the hours. Leisurely cleaned up all my files, went for a couple of walks a day, outside the building, went out for lunch more often or sat in the lunchroom longer than my norm and did the crossword puzzle.

    I did also eventually decide to write new sections for the “Training Manual” – the cruise portion and the warehouse run portion, as I was considered the “subject matter expert” in both those areas… but it was voluntary and turned out to be interesting work.

    Best of luck while you wind down… as I’m sure you are all sick of me saying.. retirement is wonderful!

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  3. The longest I worked for a single employer other than myself was 13 years. I worked as a freelance for 25. In all, I worked in the general realm of advertising/publishing/product development for about 45.

    I can’t remember being bored. Of course as a freelance I never had to pretend to be busy. Back when I was an employee, my job description did not limit me. I was nominally an art director/designer but I was also wrote copy. That employer, who also produced and published books of a how-to nature, had a photography studio and various individual departments devoted to separate topics. There were cooking books, sewing books, home repair books and hunting and fishing books. In addition to designing some of the books and seeing them through production, I also built props for the photo department and wrote and produced radio advertising for the book series. I even helped the sewing book department when their sewing machines needed adjustment.

    I always considered my “job” was to make myself useful in whatever capacity I could wherever I saw the need. That began of course with those duties that were specifically my own but extended to wherever I could be helpful. Surely the fact that you are winding down toward retirement is not a secret and the fact that you have ceased taking on new clients makes sense. Your colleagues are all, as you say, super busy. Isn’t there any way you can, for your remaining months, offer help?

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    1. I wish I could, but their job duties are so different than mine, doing their work in the community, and, most importantly to the State, I can’t bill for what they do.

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  4. i was in sales for 46 yess as rs when the pandemic hit and raised hell with my being able to my werehouse. as i closed up shop i sold of truckloads of stuff and put the remainder in storage. i started delivering door dash orders to help my daughter and ended up liking it and paying for my storage with it. storage fees are too high and i need to devote time to clearing out multiple units so i can have some tome to enjoy my retirement . i have new business ideas to start up and am looking forward to that

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  6. When walking the halls, carry a clipboard and look angry.
    Keep a spreadsheet, either fake or real, open on your computer. The messy papers is a good bit.

    Well, farming since, forever? theater in some form for almost 50 years… College 18 years.

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      1. I’m enjoying learning Italian although last week I was seriously deflated to happen upon an old movie with Sophia Loren, in Italian with English subtitles. With my eyes closed, I got probably every 20th word. Sigh.

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        1. I’m thinking about subscribing to a Spanish language television channel that is expressly set up to learn the language. I already listen to a Spanish language radio station. “Corazon” is used in 95% of all songs.

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  8. I worked for the State for a total of 46 years. Most of the work I did kept me busy. It was physical and demanding – not a desk job. I had to finish all my tasks every day. There were, however, some quiet times. Most of these times could be filled by taking someone out of the home to go shopping or out for coffee. I used to enjoy pushing wheelchairs, so I’d take someone out for a wheelchair walk. It was great exercise for me and a nice experience for someone who was stuck inside all day, sitting in a wheelchair.

    I like the idea of keeping spreadsheets or documents open on your computer. Maybe do some writing about your experiences, which may or may not be helpful to your successors, or a review of your experiences working there? I’ve never been in a situation like that, so it’s hard for me to say.

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  11. Ah, I haven’t answered all the questions. The longest job I had (besides being Mom) was, I kid you not, the six years I worked for the small consulting group from 1994 – 2000. It was also my favorite job, but they were going their separate ways by 2000.

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  12. Fourteen years was the longest I could muster at one place of employment, albeit in four different jobs. I started at the alternative school as a part-time grant writer. Then I became a full-time grant writer and fund raiser. Then, despite my misgivings about once again assuming personnel/ management responsibilities, I became office manager, and a year later, Director of Administration.

    By the time I had put in ten years, the only challenges the job itself presented were “personnel” issues. By then I was making too much money, and I was too close to retirement that it didn’t make sense to look for other employment. So I stayed put until I could retire. Thirty years in office management, split between ten years in accounting firms, six years in a law firm, and fourteen years in a non-profit. Those last four years were long, much longer than the sixteen years I’ve been retired.

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  13. 33 years at BIW in the travel division. About a dozen years in assorted retail (software, bookstore, health food, chatschis), and half dozen years in the bakery.

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    1. Not counting the various baby sitting gigs I had as a teen, I’ve had eighteen jobs of various length (not counting the four mentioned above).

      The most boring job I ever had was probably doing manual labor in a factory on the outskirts of Copenhagen the summer before I graduated from high school. Probably the most fun job was being a nanny to three wonderful kids (3, 5, and 7) at the US embassy in Moscow.

      The shortest tenure was at a restaurant in Carbondale. I had been hired on the spot to work a six hour shift as a waitress on a day when the daily special was all the spaghetti you could for dirt cheap. Three hours into my shift, a realized that the three other waitresses had gone missing; they were in the back alley smoking cigarettes. The owner of the restaurant was sitting at the bar, three sheets to the wind, and I was slip sliding away in spaghetti sauce while a bunch of unhappy customers were shouting for service. It was a madhouse, and I seemed to be the only sober person in the place. I had made $6.00 in tips, and I decided to cut my losses. I walked out the front door and never looked back.

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  14. Well, after finishing yet another report today three weeks before its due date. I decided it is ok for me to have slow days, as a reward for 25 years of working my tail off at a very hectic pace. So there!!

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  15. I had a job in public radio that lasted a little over fourteen years. I’ve been doing gardening work for longer than that – about 23 years – but it’s not anywhere near full time, so I don’t suppose that counts.

    As for passing the time when you are expected to be working…. just explore things you’d like to learn. How to fix a zipper. How to identify bird calls. Locating countries on a workd map. What children’s books have been most popular in various eras? There is so much to know. How can you possibly be bored?

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