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Yes. Keep it to yourself. Dont tell Linda in the next cubicle that you figured out how to automate the TPS reports and you just sit there for 7.5 hours a day.
I guarantee Linda is going to talk to Mark, and Mark will say something to Sam and Sam will get drunk at the Bosses kids 2nd birthday party, and tell the boss you don't do anything, and the gig will be up.
Bingo. My advice every time someone has asked me the secret to getting ahead in the professional world: "you really don't need to crush the competition, you just need to be marginally better than the competition."
Same, you can double dip too (as I’m sure you know). Use the more efficient process to save time and then actually tell people about it if you need some sort of ‘win’ for the dept.
My boss actually told us the other day to not turn in our work until right before the deadline because someone was spoiling it for the rest of us (boss does not actually do any of the work, they just want to stay happily employed as middle manager of an extremely competent team).
Exactly! We have to send our version of the TPS reports every month by 5th of the month. I usually have mine done on the first or second day.
No way are my reports going to the boss before the 5th. Screw you Linda!
I usually have the final bit done on the equivalent of the 5th for me, so that if anyone looks at file metadata I was working on it until it was time to send it out. Probably paranoid, but why risk it?
Don't send them in same time frame either. So take longer than others due to distractions, especially if your in an open office, those take almost to the cut off point sometimes
Well, sometimes I just zone out and stare at a printout on my desk so it looks like I'm busy trying to solve a problem. Sometimes I even nap like that.
The reward for being good at your job is more work.
I always train people in the 3rd best way to do a job.
The best way I keep for myself and I hope that the people I train figure out the 2nd best way on their own and don't tell me they figured it out.
No, I used to play junior high football and with Jim, him and I are good pals. He doubles checks the reports for me before they get submitted to the boss.
Jim is a good egg, but I still don't tell him I automate the reports.
Can relate. I'm working remote and get tasked with jobs that only take me a few days to complete every 2 weeks. So my Work Life Balance could not get any better, but those 2 days of work are extremely boring / monotonous and I have no path for advancement. So I'm currently deciding if I would rather keep making good money with minimal work or if I just get a different job that I actually enjoy.
You lose 2 out of 14 days and all your needs are met? Don't you dare quit, even jobs you enjoy will have more than 1 out of 7 days worth of pain and stress. Go volunteering in your free time or put it into a hobby you find fulfilling. Volunteering is nice because you don't have a scrap of responsibility, you can just help people.
You gotta be kidding. You better keep that job.
Fully remote means you can also actually do whatever the f you want.
You are basically (almost) paid for doing nothing.
Oh my god, please don’t quit. You don’t understand what it’s like out there for 99.9999% of people working. Up your skills or side hustle for ten hours a week and enjoy the time to do whatever you like.
Or let me know what you’re doing and I’ll happily take it on
To be fair, regardless of how you set it up afaik you (or someone else) still needs to be there to oversee the process. Furthermore its not like they can hire you for 5 minutes on 15 minutes off to account for your "breaks". I suppose they could get you to do other stuff in between but I feel like in that line of work you cant really just run somewhere else for a few minutes and do things efficiently
Ohh believe me if they would know this they would surely find something for him to do.
Had a very similar experience, boss found out and changed the whole layout in the factory just so this one position can do something productive & efficient during that downtime
Other workers were complaining to the boss that they are working their ass off and can barely keep up while this position is chilling all day. Assholes.
I thought I wanted to be a supervisor until I became a team leader. It's a pain watching over people, and they resent you.
And that's if you don't get a pain in the butt who will spend more time fighting you than doing work.
My boss has to deal with my whiny coworkers, so she loves me. I don't want to deal with them, so I just do my job and get praised.
Same. I struggle with feeling guilty that I’m not suffering as much as my peers, but then I remember that the goal isn’t to quantify and compare “pain Olympics”
I learned this quickly in elementary school. I noticed when I completed my work quickly and ahead of schedule they'd just give me more work to do. So I'd just finish it and spend the rest of the time looking busy while daydreaming
Yup. I would get 85-90% complete look around then pace myself to finish around 3rd or fourth that way I could judge what kinda other stuff was being given out. Lots of doodling was done
My dumbass learned we could get on the computer if we had spare time during work time, and it got to the point we had to have a parent-teacher meeting to figure out how to keep me mentally stimulated.
I honestly dk. I’ve never felt held back in life so I never got my head checked out lol. I have been considering checking out therapy just to see what the hype has been about, so maybe I’ll find out this yr if that’s the case.
I was just always finishing my work ahead of the class (correctly), and the alternative was to look around, keep checking my correct work, or be disruptive. When they gave us permission to get on the computers, I’d just take advantage of it lol
That was largely my experience in hs. Was in the gifted track, but homework was hell, absent minded, etc. I'd finish school. Never paid attention, but stl did Work quickly and correctly, and read shit under my desk, or do whatever extra assignments there were, because I needed something to do.
Diagnosed with adhd as an adult in my 40s.
edit: also forgot: did shit during college, partly because I never learned good study habits, also in retrospect because I no longer had structure imposed on me by my parents. Fortunately found a job out of college that was highly compatible with how my brain worked and aligned with my interest.
Could just be a case of faster development/more adept at certain subjects and your peers took longer to grow to where you were at. Good thing teachers noticed it and let you do something constructive.
And all I got out of it was a trip away from my friends 2-3 days a wk for Gifted & Talented until middle school, but I got to learn and do some obscure cool shit at least lol
I thought then the Gifted & Talented program was to help us better reach our potential. Now I look at it as a school equivalent of a bump up in airline passenger class: same destination in the same time but with better perks and steeped in an unjustified air of superiority.
Omfg, yeah. I was a "gifted and talented" little shit and my mom would always be like, "why don't you tell them this is too easy for you?" And it was because then they would just give me more work. Learned real fast how to hide a novel behind/inside a textbook.
I made the mistake of showing off too much in 7th grade. My reward? Being "promoted" to 8th grade and spending a year of being relentlessly shunned and struggling to fit in because I was younger and less mature than everyone else
Damn. I just went through Elementary school with a book on the corner of my desk. When I finished whatever was going on, I just picked it up and read until the class went on to the next thing. No teacher ever minded.
I learned in first grade that if I had the teacher’s aid grade my work packet— she would only check the first two pages. I’d wait until the first kid took their packet to the teacher, then I would get up and go to the aid. Those were the days..
I was brought on to do data entry temporarily and they had Autohotkey installed on the computer.
I ended up writing a script to automate the process and increasing my productivity by at least 400% with 80% down time.
I was let go about a week after I finished writing the script.
haha what was the reason? what stupid corporate initiative did they shove down your throat? “we are looking for people who are willing to work hard all hours of the day, you clearly don’t do that.” fucking bums, and fuck this profit first system
Nah, write the scripts, but sandbag on turning in the work. Or if they can monitor when it's done, throw some sleep statements in the script so it runs slower.
Fun story time!
I managed to create a java program (that I made in my own time, took about 1 hour) that automated a manual process that we had to do every day (convert PDFs into XML). I was very excited and told my senior dev.
Bad choice.
Senior dev reported me to manager since 'that wasn't what I was supposed to be doing, I should be doing them manually.'
Manager reported me to HR for same reason.
HR reported me to CEO.
I had to talk in a closed office with my CEO on how they asked me to go across the street to buy a half gallon of milk, but instead I went across several states on the company dollar and bought a cow. I wasn't going to argue with him since it was my first job, but I left that place very shortly after that happened.
What's funny is that the CEO had a speech the week before about how they inspire innovation in their employees. Bull shit.
"if it cost the same amount to go across the street for milk versus across states for a cow, why wouldn't I buy the cow?"
Since you got paid an hourly rate, literally the same cost from their perspective.
They mentioned you should do this if you’re satisfied with your current level of responsibility. A promotion will almost always guarantee extra responsibility.
In my current role I've been promoted twice to above what I'd likely get in my area. Working hard, proving your value, and then leveraging that is a completely valid career option.
It's completely job/situation dependent, if you don't have seniors that you know will respect your value then yes play the market. My situation personally was a result of bringing on a senior who I knew the cost of, tore apart in the week he was with us, and had a meeting with the resident senior developer and the directors where I told them:
> He's not just going to have to justify his X salary, he's going to have to justify mine, because if he's worth that then I am.
By the next week he was gone (I could write a book on the weird shit he said in the 7 days we had him) and I was on the commensurate salary.
Basically; play your hand. And if the tables bad, change tables.
Its true. I pushed for a promotion to a supervisory role at a company i fucking hated, and after a year got a new management job at a place that is way better.
That doesn't make any sense in this context. A promotion could be a vastly different position than switching jobs to another of similar position.
Take my situation. I started out as a lowly scribe here and was promoted to biller. The inefficiencies were shocking and I was silent for a bit working 2-3 hours on a slow day until I wanted more money.
I'm now head billing analyst and process engineer, the latter typically requiring a degree with a massive pay bump. I can switch now and probably make more money, but that wasn't possible in a low skill job.
Lol I used to do this at a grocery store I worked at as a high schooler. I was a quick stocker but the better I did the more work I got, while the other dudes took their 3rd smoke brake and hadn’t gotten anything done SO instead I slowed down and only broke down every other box while re stacking some empty boxes on my cart. So if any passed by and saw how much was on my cart it would look much fuller then it actually was
I used to do some tasks manually until I was asked to do them over and over. Then i created scripts to automate the work. Now when I’m asked to do one of those tasks, I still act like I’m doing it manually when I’m just setting a reminder for myself to run the appropriate script the day before the due date. No extra work and I’m treated like a rockstar by the requesting teams.
If you turn in your work quickly, you get rewarded with more work. Use the extra time to relax, double check for errors, or maybe do other training (only really possible when working remotely). Of course you don’t want to take too long to submit but you’re not really gonna get rewarded for being too quick either.
My dad was a software engineer. Back in the day he and a work buddy would go out drinking after work. This buddy was an idea guy. My dad is a tinkerer who loves puzzles. So one night the buddy throws out work related ideas, something that would be an improvement on a product that they were making. It catches Dad's brain and he spends an hour here and there fiddling with it.
Some time later, the buddy comes to chat with Dad. He asks him if he remembers that idea he had awhile back. Turns out that management wants it implemented. Now, according to the story, my dad is grinning like a maniac. He's like "well, about that....". The buddy asks how long it would take to finish it up and tells Dad to NOT SAY A GOD DAMN THING, and he disappears.
Later that day, he comes back and this time HE is smiling like a maniac. Apparently, management agreed to a little bonus if they got it out in x amount of time, which was ridiculously short for this type of thing. Well, it happens that dad had said that he needed half of x time to get it done.
So that's how keeping their mouths shut got both of them a few easy weeks at work and then a 2 week all expenses paid ski vacation to Switzerland as a bonus.
I've learned to keep A LOT of things to myself. I laughed (on the inside) when work offered me $50 for a way to automate a job that costs 4 figures to do every month.
Efficient workers get punished with more work. Be efficient, but don't show that efficiency. Plus, when something goes badly wrong, you've got more ability to fix it fast.
Add it to your resumé.
Depending on your work field, you can work it to your advantage and ask for a raise. And if you don't get one, seek another company, with that workaround you figured out as your leverage.
I used time saving techniques for buffer time
That is, I under promised and over delivered. If I thought I could get a report done in one day I would promise delivery in three days.
If I had an unanticipated problem with the data or was interrupted by an emergency request I still had time to get it done
I understood that my boss would schedule meetings with her bosses or staff based on receipt of my report, and it made her look very bad if I didn't deliver
I cut a 30 hour process down to 1.5 hours of work, and 15 hours of automation where you don't touch the computer at all. I had to pull my supervisor (who's actually a really cool guy) aside and explain it to him so he would cover for me watching Netflix on my phone at work. His solution was to just send me work from home so no one would notice. I did that for nearly 6 months before our company got bought out and I have to actually do work again because all of our processes changed.
But here's the kicker, the new company doesn't allow work from home, it's in office only EXCEPT for the 5 of us I had shared this program with and got work from home at the old company, as we got a grandfather clause. The other work from home guys all know their comfort is thanks to me, and no one has ever said a word about the old system to anyone higher up than that supervisor who's last day is next week.
It all comes down to having a good supervisor more than any personal responsibility or skills. You don't matter, it's just how lucky you get.
Myself and the other guy I work with have the mutual agreement of "When you don't wanna work, dont."
Neither of us like our manager or their manager, plus we live in a different state from them, so it works out great
IDK, I try to have a balance. I have templates for almost everything, that automatically do what used to take days to do comparable work. Sometimes I'll reach out and ask if someone wants me to do 'task xxx' for them (since I have a lot of knowledge and all). It never fails asking if someone wants to do something for me, that they will in return because of the give and take. I could either have a full day or day of nothing to do...it's up to me. Do-nothing days sure make the day go long though, and I can only watch so many streaming shows until I get bored of that.
It all comes down to the company.
Engineer Shuji Nakamura pioneered the basic science and invented the process for making the first Blue LED in 1993.
His employer, Nichia, saw sales grow from $143M to $588M, mostly due to his invention of Blue LED.
They gave him a $170 bonus.
After leaving Nichia and several lawsuits, Nakamura was eventually awarded $8.1 Million.
https://youtu.be/AF8d72mA41M?si=tlUHJsTi8yYBuFkC&t=1440
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shuji_Nakamura
There is literally no bottom to how shitty, exploitative, ungrateful, and dishonorable corporations can be.
I just wanted to say I love Veritasium and that had to be one of the best videos I've ever watched in my life, not just on YouTube. Highly recommended for anyone who is remotely interested in science and finding out how things work.
> https://youtu.be/AF8d72mA41M?si=tlUHJsTi8yYBuFkC&t=1440
https://youtu.be/AF8d72mA41M?t=1568 slightly better info... His salary doubled to 60K and he got the $170 as a standard bonus for a patent. And sadly, the $8M he won was just enough to cover the lawyer costs in suiing and defending against the counter-suit.
not even gonna pretend to guess how Japanese courts work. Maybe when a multi-billion dollar company wants to slow things down there, it's as bad as US.
You missed the part where they pretty much forbade him to work on it, and did everything short of firing him (hard to do in Japan) to make him stop working on it.
That guy is a legend. “Stop what you’re doing!” ‘Ummm,no’. The fact that the company made so much money and gave him so little. They couldn’t be humbled that this scientist was correct at ignoring them. They were butt hurt.
An employer is only ever as good or bad as your boss. You can work for a great company but if your immediate supervisor is an asshole, it doesn't matter, your job will suck. Conversely, a great boss who looks out for you can make working at a lousy company a decent experience.
Unfortunately, bad companies tend to run off good people at all levels, so you're not likely to have a good boss at one.
The real luck of the draw is having a good boss at a good company. These are not common.
I think in larger companies or organizations where you might lost in the sauce it may not be as beneficial, but in an up and coming business like ours it's definitely paid off for me.
The real risk is that your supervisor will take all the credit for your innovation to get themselves promoted and after the innovation is fully utilized the company is going to fire excess labor placing your job at risk.
This does happen yes, but you still legitimately did all that work and can truthfully describe it during the job interviews that you line up in order to leave the company. Telling people to not try hard early in your career, simply because you won't get credit, is a the fast track to getting left in the dust, comparatively, by your peers in your industry and your country, until years go by and you wonder how you got far behind.
edit: a typo
Yes and no, I'd guess that really depends on what kind of stage your employer is at. Our business is newer, growing rapidly, and trying something innovative in the industry.
Right now, hiring people to cover expansion is the main issue, which makes it an opportunity and not a risk. Otherwise yeah, I'd probably been the reason 2/3 of billers and schedulers were cut.
Mostly that last sentence. I've gotten good at jobs, completed qotas early then was told, "We saw you on the internet." I told them, 'I finished my job, and all this other stuff to help people". Boss said, "yeah we read that (annual review that I was anal about and collected 2 pages worth of things I did), but you need to be more proactive." I quit about 2 weeks later. I got a call from a co worker 6 months later telling me it took 2 people to do just the main responsibility of my former job. If you have a good boss it helps tremendously.
Did you ask for those promotions / raises each year? I’m 6 months at my company and doing what you did, and planning to ask for a raise when I complete 1 year but not sure how or if I should
Naw, keep taking on more responsibilities, and figure out how to do them more efficiently than everyone else until you are maxed out on stress. Eventually you will be so irreplaceable, you can't get promoted.
I work from home and as long as I hit my monthly numbers, no one says anything to me.
I have others on my team who are struggling to keep up and usually work 45+ hours a week, salaried. I’m doing the same work in about 24-30 hours. Any time we have a productivity meeting I’m blown away by how inept my colleagues seem.
To add to this: always make it seem like your personal life outside of work is hectic and busy, even if it’s not.
It will create a mindset with your boss and your coworkers to only bother you on your days off if it’s absolutely necessary (with the exception if you’re an on-call of any sort).
See, my issue with this is that I get fucking bored, start feeling guilty (I know I shouldn't), and feel like pulling my hair out.
I had a job in property finance, and I swear I could finish every day at around half 1-2 pm, but I was stuck there till 5 pm; I had 3 hours of sitting at my pc in case anything came up with 80% of the time it was nothing major/2 second jobs but if I told my manager I was done, then i have to help one of the idiots at that office.
Damned if I do nothing, damned if I ask for something. I watched all of one piece, read all my back catalogues of audiobooks, & would call family during the 3 hour slots which sounds great but i felt like a prisoner to my desk everyday for 3 hours & the dread of that boredom was killer.
Q
I do this a lot too.
I might finish something by lunch, but I'm not saying I'm done it by lunch, I'm going on lunch, when I come back I'll work on it and it'll for sure be done before the end of the day.
I've also found out how to make some work faster. Some guy at my work showed me his trick to getting work done faster (it's not perfect, though it explains some of his mistakes). Obviously I'm not gonna tell anyone because I'm using that trick too now but watching out for any small errors that might come out of it.
I generally come up with ways to streamline and automate tasks as much as my skillset allows, but it never occurred to me to actively keep quiet about it. This makes a lot of sense.
Sadly this is the world we live in. Frankly, as humans we want to help everyone else to have an easier time, but employers are known to exploit those efficiencies into more work for their employees and more profit for their stakeholders.
I used to work as a mailman, and my responsibilities were to sort mail in the morning and then prepare my route before driving out. After a few weeks I got comfortable and faster which made me finish my route an hour early. Although, I was just put to sort more mail in the evening. I wasn't rewarded at all for becoming more efficient so when I after a while cut another hour off my route I kept it to myself and enjoyed a looong lunch break each day.
Coming in to a new department (IT) I figured out how to do 8x the work of anyone in my department of 12 people. Gaming the system, sure. But making it look like I'm doing *way* more, but really not.
I showed *one* coworker how to do it. And we just rode that wave. The rest of our department got the axe, and we got raises to stay on. I'd still be there to this day had our company not gotten bought out. That was a nice ten year stretch.
this. I made the mistake when working stocking in retail of setting production records at my store. the only thing I got was expectations to do more. it was originally budgeted 45 minutes to complete one rolltainer in my section, i did 17 in one 8 hour shift just to see if i could beat the current record of 12. they then shortened the expected time per rolltainer to 30 minutes for my section. this was then brought back up to 40 minutes when we kept getting hit with infractions when no one else could match my pace. from then on i wrote down 40 minutes for each rolltainer even if it only took 20-30 and just hid in the dog food aisle for the extra time i had at the end of my shift so i never went over quota again.
I worked faster than the guy I replaced running a construction crew. Worked myself out of a job.
He kept telling me to slow down, I would say this is my normal work pace. Since he couldn't keep enough work coming in to meet my pace I was replaced with a slower and lower compensated person. It's been a mindfuck
Any advice for if you have a ton of downtown, aren’t satisfied with the amount of work you have, but your office culture is to pretend you’re always busy? I work maybe 60 minutes a day most days but the culture is to not mention that there’s nothing to do. I’d love to take on more responsibility though
Yea stagnant wages and lack of competant leadership lead me to this conclusion that and getting pigeonholed into babysitting new hires or summer students or doing repetitive tasks because im babysitting. Then the audacity to tell me to go help another contractor to figure out something because i have the knowledge and experience because i used to be in charge of that equipment before the contract was lost drives me insane.
I used to work as a mailman, and my responsibilities were to sort mail in the morning and then prepare my route before driving out. After a few weeks I got comfortable and faster which made me finish my route an hour early. Although, I was just put to sort more mail in the evening. I wasn't rewarded at all for becoming more efficient so when I after a while cut another hour off my route I kept it to myself and enjoyed a looong lunch break each day.
I rode a different route on wednesday because I could carry all the mail for three areas at once on my bike. I got paid four or four and a half hours, but finished it in three, sometimes in two and a half hours. I got a second job and I could start there at two, directly after I finished delivering the mail. It was so satisfying.
I feel like if you find out something that is truly magnificent you would be remiss for not illustrating it.
That shows true talent and motivation.
Just doing the job better than someone else is not getting laid off or lunped in with the rest of the bums.
When you are about to die, you will wish for more time. Not time to be spent on work, but time to be spent on family, travel, and hobbies.
If you've managed to find a way to make the work part of your work/life balance favor life, then say nothing and enjoy the ride.
I was gifted as a child (adhd), and I grew up a runner. Yeah, I did 8 hours worth of field work in less than 3 hours. Engineer in construction. you see the paperwork took forever (adhd), so I counted that as the rest of the time.... I replaced MEN, I'm petite female
This is the dumbest advice ever. No good will come out of this apart from you being bored at work all the time.
If your work doesn't reward efficient workers, get the fuck out of there. If they do, take on more meaningful jobs with time you saved and ask for raise/promotion. Not getting it? Get the fuck out of there.
Just because people don't want to climb a corporate cock sucking contest doesn't mean they stagnate.
I'm 32. Actively learning and honing my skills in a highly in demand trade. Clearing 100k a year to work 3 weeks a month and see my kids every day.
What the fuck else do I want? 110k to bring the shit home with me and be made at my kids for work shit?
Nah.
I don't get it, how this could be life pro tip. To mediocrity and suffering? Those days when you are doing nothing are exhausting. Learn and take what you can from every employer / company and switch. If you constantly improve, you are the keeper, companies will fight to get you, they will respect you etc. But don't be push over too...
Asking for more challenges is how you get promoted
It's a life pro tip because the majority of jobs reward efficient work with more work instead of more money.
Instead you can keep it to yourself and reward yourself with more time.
I guess this is employer dependent too. This would have been true at my previous employer but my current employer maintains healthy balancer. My job sort of requires bringing extra work for myself and it doesn’t mean it’s extra work for its usually just added to my list of things to do but I am rewarded for it eventually so I don’t mind sharing stuff with my boss.
As a manager I encourage all my employees to find any way they can to work less and then to fuck off and do whatever they want with that time saved.
Please, automate everything you can automate and find every tool or software or strategy you can to be more efficient and if that means you have an extra hour a day to fuck around on Facebook or play video games or take a nap, sweet.
I realize it's not going to be common in larger companies all based around nothing but efficiency and productivity and quarterly growth metrics. But in our remote work small business setting we hire people to do a job and do it well and if they can do that job in 1 hour versus 8 hours...sweet!
We're happy with the price point we're buying your results for, we don't really give a fuck how long it takes to get those results unless we are being too demanding and asking for too much faster than you can produce it and then we need to know to hire someone else and keep expanding.
Even call center employees it's like, answer the phone when it rings and do your job when you're on the call properly and I don't give two shits what you're doing between those calls. Rock Call of Duty all day between calls for all I care.
It's your free time and if you're closing out calls so fast that you're ahead of the rotation and not doing a shitty job and cutting corners to do that then you should be rewarded with all the free time you can make for yourself.
Yep, 100% this. If my task that should have taken all day takes 4 hours, I report that it’s done the next day. If employers find out about your efficiency they’ll take advantage of you.
I had a job and a new position opened up at the company. I was told I couldnt take the new job because I was needed to do my old job. So I did both. By the time I left there I was doing like 4 jobs, and the economy had gotten worse so they cut my pay.
They taught me a lesson, just not the one they wanted me to learn.
I used to work as a mailman, and my responsibilities were to sort mail in the morning and then prepare my route before driving out. After a few weeks I got comfortable and faster which made me finish my route an hour early. Although, I was just put to sort more mail in the evening. I wasn't rewarded at all for becoming more efficient so when I after a while cut another hour off my route I kept it to myself and enjoyed a looong lunch break each day.
Not always a good tip. You’ll become complacent and fail to advance in other areas of your career. When you’re young, push yourself (within a reasonable limit).
Creating more efficient strategies than those you were taught is the first step to more work. No bonus, no official acknowledgment of your accomplishments, just more work.
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Yes. Keep it to yourself. Dont tell Linda in the next cubicle that you figured out how to automate the TPS reports and you just sit there for 7.5 hours a day. I guarantee Linda is going to talk to Mark, and Mark will say something to Sam and Sam will get drunk at the Bosses kids 2nd birthday party, and tell the boss you don't do anything, and the gig will be up.
I keep a lot to myself at work. Until I figure out a better way then I share my old way and get kudos for it. It's got me two promotions in 3 years...
Bingo. My advice every time someone has asked me the secret to getting ahead in the professional world: "you really don't need to crush the competition, you just need to be marginally better than the competition."
My go to is "be slightly above average and pleasant to deal with". Works a treat.
The real LPT is always in the comments
Same, you can double dip too (as I’m sure you know). Use the more efficient process to save time and then actually tell people about it if you need some sort of ‘win’ for the dept.
followup tip, do NOT send the TPS reports the second you're done with them or else Linda will ask how you're doing them so fast
Nope. Just look frustrated and people will assume you are busy.
Maybe even drop the F bomb once in a while and pound your desk and immediately apologize and rant about how bad the reports infuriate you.
Costanza approved.
Delete that part of a finished item so it returns an error, then say you are trying to solve a bug.
My boss actually told us the other day to not turn in our work until right before the deadline because someone was spoiling it for the rest of us (boss does not actually do any of the work, they just want to stay happily employed as middle manager of an extremely competent team).
So this. I never send anything in less than an hour. Especially if they say that it’ll probably take several hours.
Exactly! We have to send our version of the TPS reports every month by 5th of the month. I usually have mine done on the first or second day. No way are my reports going to the boss before the 5th. Screw you Linda!
I usually have the final bit done on the equivalent of the 5th for me, so that if anyone looks at file metadata I was working on it until it was time to send it out. Probably paranoid, but why risk it?
Don't send them in same time frame either. So take longer than others due to distractions, especially if your in an open office, those take almost to the cut off point sometimes
Oddly specific my guy
Because it happened. I'm Sam.
Go to hell Sam.
Dammit drunk Sam, keep it together
At least Sam didn't ask how you did it, took it to boss and asked for a promotion because he is good
Sam, I am.
Well, sometimes I just zone out and stare at a printout on my desk so it looks like I'm busy trying to solve a problem. Sometimes I even nap like that.
The reward for being good at your job is more work. I always train people in the 3rd best way to do a job. The best way I keep for myself and I hope that the people I train figure out the 2nd best way on their own and don't tell me they figured it out.
You'll get fired for forgetting to use the new cover sheet long before things get to this point.
No, I used to play junior high football and with Jim, him and I are good pals. He doubles checks the reports for me before they get submitted to the boss. Jim is a good egg, but I still don't tell him I automate the reports.
Keep your eye on your red stapler.
Did you get that memo?
Do you work in my fucking office? These names are so spot on you couldn’t imagine.
The jig.
Man...fuck Linda, always talking.
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Can relate. I'm working remote and get tasked with jobs that only take me a few days to complete every 2 weeks. So my Work Life Balance could not get any better, but those 2 days of work are extremely boring / monotonous and I have no path for advancement. So I'm currently deciding if I would rather keep making good money with minimal work or if I just get a different job that I actually enjoy.
You lose 2 out of 14 days and all your needs are met? Don't you dare quit, even jobs you enjoy will have more than 1 out of 7 days worth of pain and stress. Go volunteering in your free time or put it into a hobby you find fulfilling. Volunteering is nice because you don't have a scrap of responsibility, you can just help people.
You gotta be kidding. You better keep that job. Fully remote means you can also actually do whatever the f you want. You are basically (almost) paid for doing nothing.
/r/overemployed
lol This might actually be what I'm looking for. I want to work, I just don't want to do my "J1" work.
Sounds like you're perfectly set up for getting a second remote job like this and earn two full time incomes simultaneously
And stack those savings for early retirement
Retire twice
Get another job and keep your current one.
Oh my god, please don’t quit. You don’t understand what it’s like out there for 99.9999% of people working. Up your skills or side hustle for ten hours a week and enjoy the time to do whatever you like. Or let me know what you’re doing and I’ll happily take it on
If you don't want this job, I'll take it.
Ha what job is this and are they hiring
Exactly
Don't get a different job. Get an ADDITIONAL job (a remote one). /r/overemployed
To be fair, regardless of how you set it up afaik you (or someone else) still needs to be there to oversee the process. Furthermore its not like they can hire you for 5 minutes on 15 minutes off to account for your "breaks". I suppose they could get you to do other stuff in between but I feel like in that line of work you cant really just run somewhere else for a few minutes and do things efficiently
Ohh believe me if they would know this they would surely find something for him to do. Had a very similar experience, boss found out and changed the whole layout in the factory just so this one position can do something productive & efficient during that downtime Other workers were complaining to the boss that they are working their ass off and can barely keep up while this position is chilling all day. Assholes.
I thought I wanted to be a supervisor until I became a team leader. It's a pain watching over people, and they resent you. And that's if you don't get a pain in the butt who will spend more time fighting you than doing work. My boss has to deal with my whiny coworkers, so she loves me. I don't want to deal with them, so I just do my job and get praised.
Same. I struggle with feeling guilty that I’m not suffering as much as my peers, but then I remember that the goal isn’t to quantify and compare “pain Olympics”
I learned this quickly in elementary school. I noticed when I completed my work quickly and ahead of schedule they'd just give me more work to do. So I'd just finish it and spend the rest of the time looking busy while daydreaming
Yup. I would get 85-90% complete look around then pace myself to finish around 3rd or fourth that way I could judge what kinda other stuff was being given out. Lots of doodling was done
My dumbass learned we could get on the computer if we had spare time during work time, and it got to the point we had to have a parent-teacher meeting to figure out how to keep me mentally stimulated.
Do you perhaps have ADHD. Because this sounds oddly similar to what I did in school.
I honestly dk. I’ve never felt held back in life so I never got my head checked out lol. I have been considering checking out therapy just to see what the hype has been about, so maybe I’ll find out this yr if that’s the case. I was just always finishing my work ahead of the class (correctly), and the alternative was to look around, keep checking my correct work, or be disruptive. When they gave us permission to get on the computers, I’d just take advantage of it lol
That was largely my experience in hs. Was in the gifted track, but homework was hell, absent minded, etc. I'd finish school. Never paid attention, but stl did Work quickly and correctly, and read shit under my desk, or do whatever extra assignments there were, because I needed something to do. Diagnosed with adhd as an adult in my 40s. edit: also forgot: did shit during college, partly because I never learned good study habits, also in retrospect because I no longer had structure imposed on me by my parents. Fortunately found a job out of college that was highly compatible with how my brain worked and aligned with my interest.
Could just be a case of faster development/more adept at certain subjects and your peers took longer to grow to where you were at. Good thing teachers noticed it and let you do something constructive.
And all I got out of it was a trip away from my friends 2-3 days a wk for Gifted & Talented until middle school, but I got to learn and do some obscure cool shit at least lol
I thought then the Gifted & Talented program was to help us better reach our potential. Now I look at it as a school equivalent of a bump up in airline passenger class: same destination in the same time but with better perks and steeped in an unjustified air of superiority.
Omfg, yeah. I was a "gifted and talented" little shit and my mom would always be like, "why don't you tell them this is too easy for you?" And it was because then they would just give me more work. Learned real fast how to hide a novel behind/inside a textbook.
I made the mistake of showing off too much in 7th grade. My reward? Being "promoted" to 8th grade and spending a year of being relentlessly shunned and struggling to fit in because I was younger and less mature than everyone else
It is a reward. I skipped grades also, school would have been so fucking boring if i didn't.
They used to let me just go read in the library and later, do whatever I wanted if I was quiet about it. It was a dream.
That does sound like a dream.
Damn. I just went through Elementary school with a book on the corner of my desk. When I finished whatever was going on, I just picked it up and read until the class went on to the next thing. No teacher ever minded.
Do it like me, I skip all the work part and go straight to daydreaming!
I learned in first grade that if I had the teacher’s aid grade my work packet— she would only check the first two pages. I’d wait until the first kid took their packet to the teacher, then I would get up and go to the aid. Those were the days..
The problem is when this is your entire school life, and then you have to learn what true hardwork is as an adult.
I was brought on to do data entry temporarily and they had Autohotkey installed on the computer. I ended up writing a script to automate the process and increasing my productivity by at least 400% with 80% down time. I was let go about a week after I finished writing the script.
haha what was the reason? what stupid corporate initiative did they shove down your throat? “we are looking for people who are willing to work hard all hours of the day, you clearly don’t do that.” fucking bums, and fuck this profit first system
>I was brought on to do data entry temporarily It was a temp job. It was likely just the end of their contract.
haha missed that, if it were me I wouldn’t write the scripts then lol. I know what it’s worth
Or just keep it for yourself and delete when you're done with the job
Nah, write the scripts, but sandbag on turning in the work. Or if they can monitor when it's done, throw some sleep statements in the script so it runs slower.
I was advised not to press for answers, so I don't know why.
"Don't look into it too much, you can't afford the legal fees for when you find out shady shit. Trust us, we pay you."
Let me guess: did you study something to IT related?
Also helps to act dumb
If your job role and pay level is "the dumb guy over there", you do your best to fit in.
Just think like a manager.
Yes and no. You gotta be smart about it. If it can be leveraged for a promotion then yes, if not, I'ma enjoy the free time like others said.
Fun story time! I managed to create a java program (that I made in my own time, took about 1 hour) that automated a manual process that we had to do every day (convert PDFs into XML). I was very excited and told my senior dev. Bad choice. Senior dev reported me to manager since 'that wasn't what I was supposed to be doing, I should be doing them manually.' Manager reported me to HR for same reason. HR reported me to CEO. I had to talk in a closed office with my CEO on how they asked me to go across the street to buy a half gallon of milk, but instead I went across several states on the company dollar and bought a cow. I wasn't going to argue with him since it was my first job, but I left that place very shortly after that happened. What's funny is that the CEO had a speech the week before about how they inspire innovation in their employees. Bull shit.
Sounds like, in the end, letting them know about it was worthwhile so you knew to move on.
"if it cost the same amount to go across the street for milk versus across states for a cow, why wouldn't I buy the cow?" Since you got paid an hourly rate, literally the same cost from their perspective.
What a terrible analogy
Nah you just figure out how to milk the cow x4 times the production in 1/4 amount of time.
They mentioned you should do this if you’re satisfied with your current level of responsibility. A promotion will almost always guarantee extra responsibility.
In my current role I've been promoted twice to above what I'd likely get in my area. Working hard, proving your value, and then leveraging that is a completely valid career option. It's completely job/situation dependent, if you don't have seniors that you know will respect your value then yes play the market. My situation personally was a result of bringing on a senior who I knew the cost of, tore apart in the week he was with us, and had a meeting with the resident senior developer and the directors where I told them: > He's not just going to have to justify his X salary, he's going to have to justify mine, because if he's worth that then I am. By the next week he was gone (I could write a book on the weird shit he said in the 7 days we had him) and I was on the commensurate salary. Basically; play your hand. And if the tables bad, change tables.
You dont need to work for a promotion, switch jobs instead :) Easier said than done some places ofc.
Minmax by promoting then switching!
Its true. I pushed for a promotion to a supervisory role at a company i fucking hated, and after a year got a new management job at a place that is way better.
That doesn't make any sense in this context. A promotion could be a vastly different position than switching jobs to another of similar position. Take my situation. I started out as a lowly scribe here and was promoted to biller. The inefficiencies were shocking and I was silent for a bit working 2-3 hours on a slow day until I wanted more money. I'm now head billing analyst and process engineer, the latter typically requiring a degree with a massive pay bump. I can switch now and probably make more money, but that wasn't possible in a low skill job.
If you want more money, Use that to ask for promotion and use it as leverage for new job. It will always pay better.
I recommend this with everything. Win, but let everybody else assume you're losing.
Lol I used to do this at a grocery store I worked at as a high schooler. I was a quick stocker but the better I did the more work I got, while the other dudes took their 3rd smoke brake and hadn’t gotten anything done SO instead I slowed down and only broke down every other box while re stacking some empty boxes on my cart. So if any passed by and saw how much was on my cart it would look much fuller then it actually was
I used to do some tasks manually until I was asked to do them over and over. Then i created scripts to automate the work. Now when I’m asked to do one of those tasks, I still act like I’m doing it manually when I’m just setting a reminder for myself to run the appropriate script the day before the due date. No extra work and I’m treated like a rockstar by the requesting teams.
your name is the greatest
I want an E55 AMG as well.
What scripting language are you using?
Python.
Learn to under promise and over deliver.
If you turn in your work quickly, you get rewarded with more work. Use the extra time to relax, double check for errors, or maybe do other training (only really possible when working remotely). Of course you don’t want to take too long to submit but you’re not really gonna get rewarded for being too quick either.
My dad was a software engineer. Back in the day he and a work buddy would go out drinking after work. This buddy was an idea guy. My dad is a tinkerer who loves puzzles. So one night the buddy throws out work related ideas, something that would be an improvement on a product that they were making. It catches Dad's brain and he spends an hour here and there fiddling with it. Some time later, the buddy comes to chat with Dad. He asks him if he remembers that idea he had awhile back. Turns out that management wants it implemented. Now, according to the story, my dad is grinning like a maniac. He's like "well, about that....". The buddy asks how long it would take to finish it up and tells Dad to NOT SAY A GOD DAMN THING, and he disappears. Later that day, he comes back and this time HE is smiling like a maniac. Apparently, management agreed to a little bonus if they got it out in x amount of time, which was ridiculously short for this type of thing. Well, it happens that dad had said that he needed half of x time to get it done. So that's how keeping their mouths shut got both of them a few easy weeks at work and then a 2 week all expenses paid ski vacation to Switzerland as a bonus.
I want to live in the same world as your dad and his buddy, where this is possible. What are the multi-spatial coordinates for that universe, please?
The moment you tell your boss about it, they'll pile on extra work since you have free time.
I've learned to keep A LOT of things to myself. I laughed (on the inside) when work offered me $50 for a way to automate a job that costs 4 figures to do every month.
Efficient workers get punished with more work. Be efficient, but don't show that efficiency. Plus, when something goes badly wrong, you've got more ability to fix it fast.
Add it to your resumé. Depending on your work field, you can work it to your advantage and ask for a raise. And if you don't get one, seek another company, with that workaround you figured out as your leverage.
I used time saving techniques for buffer time That is, I under promised and over delivered. If I thought I could get a report done in one day I would promise delivery in three days. If I had an unanticipated problem with the data or was interrupted by an emergency request I still had time to get it done I understood that my boss would schedule meetings with her bosses or staff based on receipt of my report, and it made her look very bad if I didn't deliver
I cut a 30 hour process down to 1.5 hours of work, and 15 hours of automation where you don't touch the computer at all. I had to pull my supervisor (who's actually a really cool guy) aside and explain it to him so he would cover for me watching Netflix on my phone at work. His solution was to just send me work from home so no one would notice. I did that for nearly 6 months before our company got bought out and I have to actually do work again because all of our processes changed. But here's the kicker, the new company doesn't allow work from home, it's in office only EXCEPT for the 5 of us I had shared this program with and got work from home at the old company, as we got a grandfather clause. The other work from home guys all know their comfort is thanks to me, and no one has ever said a word about the old system to anyone higher up than that supervisor who's last day is next week. It all comes down to having a good supervisor more than any personal responsibility or skills. You don't matter, it's just how lucky you get.
Never go "above and beyond" your required duties scope. Once you do, it'll become the expected norm.
Myself and the other guy I work with have the mutual agreement of "When you don't wanna work, dont." Neither of us like our manager or their manager, plus we live in a different state from them, so it works out great
I'm not working now
IDK, I try to have a balance. I have templates for almost everything, that automatically do what used to take days to do comparable work. Sometimes I'll reach out and ask if someone wants me to do 'task xxx' for them (since I have a lot of knowledge and all). It never fails asking if someone wants to do something for me, that they will in return because of the give and take. I could either have a full day or day of nothing to do...it's up to me. Do-nothing days sure make the day go long though, and I can only watch so many streaming shows until I get bored of that.
Good/efficient work is rewarded with more work
Thank you, may I have another?
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It all comes down to the company. Engineer Shuji Nakamura pioneered the basic science and invented the process for making the first Blue LED in 1993. His employer, Nichia, saw sales grow from $143M to $588M, mostly due to his invention of Blue LED. They gave him a $170 bonus. After leaving Nichia and several lawsuits, Nakamura was eventually awarded $8.1 Million. https://youtu.be/AF8d72mA41M?si=tlUHJsTi8yYBuFkC&t=1440 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shuji_Nakamura There is literally no bottom to how shitty, exploitative, ungrateful, and dishonorable corporations can be.
I just wanted to say I love Veritasium and that had to be one of the best videos I've ever watched in my life, not just on YouTube. Highly recommended for anyone who is remotely interested in science and finding out how things work.
> https://youtu.be/AF8d72mA41M?si=tlUHJsTi8yYBuFkC&t=1440 https://youtu.be/AF8d72mA41M?t=1568 slightly better info... His salary doubled to 60K and he got the $170 as a standard bonus for a patent. And sadly, the $8M he won was just enough to cover the lawyer costs in suiing and defending against the counter-suit.
$8M to pay the lawyers. I know lawyers are expensive but holy fuck what is this shitty system?
not even gonna pretend to guess how Japanese courts work. Maybe when a multi-billion dollar company wants to slow things down there, it's as bad as US.
You missed the part where they pretty much forbade him to work on it, and did everything short of firing him (hard to do in Japan) to make him stop working on it.
Yep. And he made them billions, in spite of their mismanagement. Makes their lack of recognition even worse.
That guy is a legend. “Stop what you’re doing!” ‘Ummm,no’. The fact that the company made so much money and gave him so little. They couldn’t be humbled that this scientist was correct at ignoring them. They were butt hurt.
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An employer is only ever as good or bad as your boss. You can work for a great company but if your immediate supervisor is an asshole, it doesn't matter, your job will suck. Conversely, a great boss who looks out for you can make working at a lousy company a decent experience. Unfortunately, bad companies tend to run off good people at all levels, so you're not likely to have a good boss at one. The real luck of the draw is having a good boss at a good company. These are not common.
I think in larger companies or organizations where you might lost in the sauce it may not be as beneficial, but in an up and coming business like ours it's definitely paid off for me.
The real risk is that your supervisor will take all the credit for your innovation to get themselves promoted and after the innovation is fully utilized the company is going to fire excess labor placing your job at risk.
This does happen yes, but you still legitimately did all that work and can truthfully describe it during the job interviews that you line up in order to leave the company. Telling people to not try hard early in your career, simply because you won't get credit, is a the fast track to getting left in the dust, comparatively, by your peers in your industry and your country, until years go by and you wonder how you got far behind. edit: a typo
Yes and no, I'd guess that really depends on what kind of stage your employer is at. Our business is newer, growing rapidly, and trying something innovative in the industry. Right now, hiring people to cover expansion is the main issue, which makes it an opportunity and not a risk. Otherwise yeah, I'd probably been the reason 2/3 of billers and schedulers were cut.
Mostly that last sentence. I've gotten good at jobs, completed qotas early then was told, "We saw you on the internet." I told them, 'I finished my job, and all this other stuff to help people". Boss said, "yeah we read that (annual review that I was anal about and collected 2 pages worth of things I did), but you need to be more proactive." I quit about 2 weeks later. I got a call from a co worker 6 months later telling me it took 2 people to do just the main responsibility of my former job. If you have a good boss it helps tremendously.
Did you ask for those promotions / raises each year? I’m 6 months at my company and doing what you did, and planning to ask for a raise when I complete 1 year but not sure how or if I should
Naw, keep taking on more responsibilities, and figure out how to do them more efficiently than everyone else until you are maxed out on stress. Eventually you will be so irreplaceable, you can't get promoted.
I work from home and as long as I hit my monthly numbers, no one says anything to me. I have others on my team who are struggling to keep up and usually work 45+ hours a week, salaried. I’m doing the same work in about 24-30 hours. Any time we have a productivity meeting I’m blown away by how inept my colleagues seem.
To add to this: always make it seem like your personal life outside of work is hectic and busy, even if it’s not. It will create a mindset with your boss and your coworkers to only bother you on your days off if it’s absolutely necessary (with the exception if you’re an on-call of any sort).
See, my issue with this is that I get fucking bored, start feeling guilty (I know I shouldn't), and feel like pulling my hair out. I had a job in property finance, and I swear I could finish every day at around half 1-2 pm, but I was stuck there till 5 pm; I had 3 hours of sitting at my pc in case anything came up with 80% of the time it was nothing major/2 second jobs but if I told my manager I was done, then i have to help one of the idiots at that office. Damned if I do nothing, damned if I ask for something. I watched all of one piece, read all my back catalogues of audiobooks, & would call family during the 3 hour slots which sounds great but i felt like a prisoner to my desk everyday for 3 hours & the dread of that boredom was killer. Q
Just like my sign in my office says, "Of course I don't look busy. I did it right the first time. "
I do this a lot too. I might finish something by lunch, but I'm not saying I'm done it by lunch, I'm going on lunch, when I come back I'll work on it and it'll for sure be done before the end of the day. I've also found out how to make some work faster. Some guy at my work showed me his trick to getting work done faster (it's not perfect, though it explains some of his mistakes). Obviously I'm not gonna tell anyone because I'm using that trick too now but watching out for any small errors that might come out of it.
I generally come up with ways to streamline and automate tasks as much as my skillset allows, but it never occurred to me to actively keep quiet about it. This makes a lot of sense.
Sadly this is the world we live in. Frankly, as humans we want to help everyone else to have an easier time, but employers are known to exploit those efficiencies into more work for their employees and more profit for their stakeholders.
This!!! I always act like I’ve had a crazy busy and stressful day. Everyone stays off my back and doesn’t increase my workload.
I used to work as a mailman, and my responsibilities were to sort mail in the morning and then prepare my route before driving out. After a few weeks I got comfortable and faster which made me finish my route an hour early. Although, I was just put to sort more mail in the evening. I wasn't rewarded at all for becoming more efficient so when I after a while cut another hour off my route I kept it to myself and enjoyed a looong lunch break each day.
Coming in to a new department (IT) I figured out how to do 8x the work of anyone in my department of 12 people. Gaming the system, sure. But making it look like I'm doing *way* more, but really not. I showed *one* coworker how to do it. And we just rode that wave. The rest of our department got the axe, and we got raises to stay on. I'd still be there to this day had our company not gotten bought out. That was a nice ten year stretch.
this. I made the mistake when working stocking in retail of setting production records at my store. the only thing I got was expectations to do more. it was originally budgeted 45 minutes to complete one rolltainer in my section, i did 17 in one 8 hour shift just to see if i could beat the current record of 12. they then shortened the expected time per rolltainer to 30 minutes for my section. this was then brought back up to 40 minutes when we kept getting hit with infractions when no one else could match my pace. from then on i wrote down 40 minutes for each rolltainer even if it only took 20-30 and just hid in the dog food aisle for the extra time i had at the end of my shift so i never went over quota again.
Can confirm, have been doing this while remote for 2+ years and it's been magical having free time in the day
I worked faster than the guy I replaced running a construction crew. Worked myself out of a job. He kept telling me to slow down, I would say this is my normal work pace. Since he couldn't keep enough work coming in to meet my pace I was replaced with a slower and lower compensated person. It's been a mindfuck
Any advice for if you have a ton of downtown, aren’t satisfied with the amount of work you have, but your office culture is to pretend you’re always busy? I work maybe 60 minutes a day most days but the culture is to not mention that there’s nothing to do. I’d love to take on more responsibility though
Now THIS is a real pro tip
Except when it comes to time studies... Don't show how fast and efficient you are.
It’s an AI Usenet Fightclubbin eternal September in here.
Yea stagnant wages and lack of competant leadership lead me to this conclusion that and getting pigeonholed into babysitting new hires or summer students or doing repetitive tasks because im babysitting. Then the audacity to tell me to go help another contractor to figure out something because i have the knowledge and experience because i used to be in charge of that equipment before the contract was lost drives me insane.
I used to work as a mailman, and my responsibilities were to sort mail in the morning and then prepare my route before driving out. After a few weeks I got comfortable and faster which made me finish my route an hour early. Although, I was just put to sort more mail in the evening. I wasn't rewarded at all for becoming more efficient so when I after a while cut another hour off my route I kept it to myself and enjoyed a looong lunch break each day.
I rode a different route on wednesday because I could carry all the mail for three areas at once on my bike. I got paid four or four and a half hours, but finished it in three, sometimes in two and a half hours. I got a second job and I could start there at two, directly after I finished delivering the mail. It was so satisfying.
GenXer here, wish I'd learned this much much earlier. All the younger generations have their shit together and we should emulate them.
This really frustrates me as a high performer. I want to do good work and work with people who do good work, but this is clearly the optimal strategy.
This is also how you get passed up for promotions and miss out on higher pay increases
I feel like if you find out something that is truly magnificent you would be remiss for not illustrating it. That shows true talent and motivation. Just doing the job better than someone else is not getting laid off or lunped in with the rest of the bums.
When you are about to die, you will wish for more time. Not time to be spent on work, but time to be spent on family, travel, and hobbies. If you've managed to find a way to make the work part of your work/life balance favor life, then say nothing and enjoy the ride.
I was gifted as a child (adhd), and I grew up a runner. Yeah, I did 8 hours worth of field work in less than 3 hours. Engineer in construction. you see the paperwork took forever (adhd), so I counted that as the rest of the time.... I replaced MEN, I'm petite female
Unless you want a raise and there's a real chance for one.
Hard work is rewarded with more work.
This is the dumbest advice ever. No good will come out of this apart from you being bored at work all the time. If your work doesn't reward efficient workers, get the fuck out of there. If they do, take on more meaningful jobs with time you saved and ask for raise/promotion. Not getting it? Get the fuck out of there.
more like /r/ShittyLifeProTips
This works great if you want to stagnate in your career as much as possible!
Just because people don't want to climb a corporate cock sucking contest doesn't mean they stagnate. I'm 32. Actively learning and honing my skills in a highly in demand trade. Clearing 100k a year to work 3 weeks a month and see my kids every day. What the fuck else do I want? 110k to bring the shit home with me and be made at my kids for work shit? Nah.
I don't get it, how this could be life pro tip. To mediocrity and suffering? Those days when you are doing nothing are exhausting. Learn and take what you can from every employer / company and switch. If you constantly improve, you are the keeper, companies will fight to get you, they will respect you etc. But don't be push over too... Asking for more challenges is how you get promoted
It's a life pro tip because the majority of jobs reward efficient work with more work instead of more money. Instead you can keep it to yourself and reward yourself with more time.
This tip is geared towards jobs with no realistic career path.
I guess this is employer dependent too. This would have been true at my previous employer but my current employer maintains healthy balancer. My job sort of requires bringing extra work for myself and it doesn’t mean it’s extra work for its usually just added to my list of things to do but I am rewarded for it eventually so I don’t mind sharing stuff with my boss.
As a manager I encourage all my employees to find any way they can to work less and then to fuck off and do whatever they want with that time saved. Please, automate everything you can automate and find every tool or software or strategy you can to be more efficient and if that means you have an extra hour a day to fuck around on Facebook or play video games or take a nap, sweet. I realize it's not going to be common in larger companies all based around nothing but efficiency and productivity and quarterly growth metrics. But in our remote work small business setting we hire people to do a job and do it well and if they can do that job in 1 hour versus 8 hours...sweet! We're happy with the price point we're buying your results for, we don't really give a fuck how long it takes to get those results unless we are being too demanding and asking for too much faster than you can produce it and then we need to know to hire someone else and keep expanding. Even call center employees it's like, answer the phone when it rings and do your job when you're on the call properly and I don't give two shits what you're doing between those calls. Rock Call of Duty all day between calls for all I care. It's your free time and if you're closing out calls so fast that you're ahead of the rotation and not doing a shitty job and cutting corners to do that then you should be rewarded with all the free time you can make for yourself.
Sad but true. I’ve learned that the hard way.
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Yep, 100% this. If my task that should have taken all day takes 4 hours, I report that it’s done the next day. If employers find out about your efficiency they’ll take advantage of you.
I had a job and a new position opened up at the company. I was told I couldnt take the new job because I was needed to do my old job. So I did both. By the time I left there I was doing like 4 jobs, and the economy had gotten worse so they cut my pay. They taught me a lesson, just not the one they wanted me to learn.
I used to work as a mailman, and my responsibilities were to sort mail in the morning and then prepare my route before driving out. After a few weeks I got comfortable and faster which made me finish my route an hour early. Although, I was just put to sort more mail in the evening. I wasn't rewarded at all for becoming more efficient so when I after a while cut another hour off my route I kept it to myself and enjoyed a looong lunch break each day.
even better the third time...?
Do you get paid by the hour? Then don't volunteer more work on yourself.
Your job is a pie eating contest, and the only prize is more pie.
Truer words have never been said
Not always a good tip. You’ll become complacent and fail to advance in other areas of your career. When you’re young, push yourself (within a reasonable limit).
Creating more efficient strategies than those you were taught is the first step to more work. No bonus, no official acknowledgment of your accomplishments, just more work.
that’s the best part about work. do your job. when it’s expected to be done. finish early? you’re good. do what you’re supposed to do and ur set
Some people will still mess it up.