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[Forum Management]

What sort of things do you do to look busy at work?  Are you someone who focuses on work 100% or do you think you work better if you stop to chat from time to time?

[lava]

Sometimes when I am at work, I try to look busy by taking my notepad and begin to write things on it that have nothing to do with work.  These can be notes on things that I need to do when I get home or sometimes I'll just doodle.  It often makes me look busy, even though I'm either bored or just trying to organize my daily schedule.

[Spinner]

This topic reminds me of the episode on "Seinfeld" when George decided to pretend he was irritable and annoyed at work so his fellow employees would think he was busy, over worked, and over stressed.  Even though he was pretending, I must admit he did look like someone who had no time on his hands and was too busy with his job.  This change in behavior worked on TV and I'm sure it works in real life. 

[Tomtom]

My boss is always irritable at work so no one bothers him because he'll snap at you.  I don't know if he's over stressed or just giving the illusion of being to busy to talk. 

I feel if you want to look busy at work, I recommend creating a messy desk that is full of several papers, binders, sticky notes, and projects that you are in the process of doing.  A messy desk looks as though you are too involved and overwhelmed with work. 

[Sunny]

People around me at work look busy, but in actuality they're not.  Sometimes you'll see them on their computer, but when you go up to them, you realize they're sending a quick email to a friend or reading the news on their computer.

In actaulity, we're not suppose to be using the computer for any personal use, but people try to get away with it from time to time.  I'm sure that management will eventually put a stop to it, but so far people are still surfing the web.

[Coultrane]

Hi Sunny,

I'm one of those people who always surfs the net while at work.  For me, surfing the web is a nice change of venue and it relaxes me during the stressful day of work.  As long as surfing the web doesn't interfer with the progress at work, I see nothing wrong with it. The way I look at it, I'm in the office for 8 hours.  I need to have something to break up the monotony of the day.  If they take surfing the web away from us, chances are I'll get bored with my job and progress will slow down.

[Betty]

Where I work they company has blocked certain web sites for us to view.  These include email accounts from yahoo and msn.  One of the problems we were having was too many people were abusing their privileges on-line.  They would play games on-line and some would down load material.  Eventually a group of computers had virus and needed to be fixed.  The cost to fix this problem was costly.  I'm surprised some companies let their employees go on-line. 

[LouiseA]

At a previous retail job (we sold alcohol which should explain a lot)the fax would cause the phone to ring (this happened A LOT) and if the (often slightly intoxicated) customer was really bending my ear I would have a fake conversation with the fax machine to encourage them to leave! It worked a treat!

[Coultrane]

I used to work in a small grocery store and I can relate to your comment Louisa about customers coming in intoxicated.  This didn't happen a lot, but every now and then someone would come in to buy some beer.  As a cashier, they would sometimes make small talk with me.  I didn't mind, but when they talked on and on, it became a bit too much.  The minute I saw another customer come around I would politely excuse myself and see if I can be of service to someone else.  It's another quick way to get out of a bad situation.

[Chevy]

Surfing the internet definitely ranks high on my list, but at one job, I didn't have access to the internet at all. I would open a notepad window and write journal-type entries or lists of things I needed to do that day. Sometimes I just needed that break from actual work and even typing silly little lists would be enough to get my mind off work for a while.

[Robin Tetley]

I guess I'm in a unique situation of working from home. There certainly are many distractions but I just block them out.

I used to work in a Government office in Nottingham and the time wasted by people chatting was unbelievable. It was flexi-time and if you walked into the office at 8.06am it was sometimes 8.25am by the time you actually reached the desk. I know that people would put 8.06am and not 8.25am on their time sheets.