How to deal with extreme boredom and pretending to be busy at work
Having little to no work to do while forced to sit in an office all day leads to severe mental health strain, loss of confidence, and stagnation. People end up wasting their days secretly trying to fill time, which causes them to feel less capable than they were a year prior.
What people tried
Every workaround mentioned in the threads below. We haven’t tested any of them — and nobody here is claiming they worked.
- 1taking free online courses related to the field
- 2reading books on a phone using a stand and web browser to appear busy
- 3trying to proactively ask for involvement in projects
In their words
Unedited, grouped by where they were said, most upvoted first within each place, each linked to the thread it came from.
“I have to go to the office every day and just pretend to be busy while I'm actually bored to death.”source ↗
“sometimes it feels like this situation could be just as harmful to my mental health, just in a different way.”source ↗
“I feel like I'm just wasting my days and sometimes I feel less confident in my work than I felt a year ago”source ↗
“The worst part is the boredom from waiting for something to break in industrial maintenance”source ↗
Where this came up
People with this problem also raised
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