Asklemmy

44148 readers

2054 users here now

A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions

Search asklemmy 🔍

If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!

Open-ended question
Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
An actual topic of discussion

Looking for support?

Looking for a community?

Lemmyverse: community search
sub.rehab: maps old subreddits to fediverse options, marks official as such
!lemmy411@lemmy.ca: a community for finding communities

~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_A@discuss.tchncs.de~

founded 5 years ago

MODERATORS

108

to those of you who get bored at work if there's lots of downtime, why? (linux.community)

submitted 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) by vestmoria@linux.community to c/asklemmy@lemmy.ml

60 comments fedilink hide all child comments

I read posts about people quitting jobs because they're boring or there is not much to do and I don't get it: what's wrong with being paid for doing nothing or not much at all?

Examples I can think of: being paid to be present but only working 30 minutes to 2 hours every 8 hours, or a job where you have to work 5 minutes every 30 minutes.

What's wrong with reading a book, writing poetry or a novel, exercising, playing with the smartphone... and going home to enjoy your hobbies fully rested?

Am I missing something?

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] MossyFeathers@pawb.social 5 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago)

As someone else mentioned, some jobs have micromanagers who get pissy if they think you aren't working, and keeping up appearances is draining.

From a different perspective, however, is that when it comes to creative fields specifically, downtime means you aren't improving your skills, creating portfolio work, etc. Due to the contracts creative jobs often have, anything you create on company time (and sometimes outside of company time, not that they can legally enforce it, but they'll try) is typically owned by the company. As such, working on personal projects during downtime is a great way to lose ownership of a passion project you're working on, and no official work means you aren't improving or adding to your portfolio (not that creative fields typically have downtime, usually they're the opposite).

It's speculated that that's why Valve had some major staff members leave the company a few years before Half-Life Alyx; they had nothing to do and were just sitting there spinning their wheels.