Maximising Free Time at Work
My Thoughts on Sustainable & Safe Time Theft
This Article is written with the expectation that you are a white collar office drone like myself. I have worked plenty of manual jobs in the past, but this article is written with office workers in mind as that’s where I honed this technique.
Click here for the TL:DR
I come up with my best ideas, do most of my big thinking and do nearly all of my budgeting and life planning at work, in the 5 minute chunks of time in between pomodoro sessions and in every other break I can worm in, I think I do my best work on the toilet.
A philosopher king on his porcelain throne, ruminating on shit metaphorical and literal.1
My average toilet break is twice as long as it should be and I’ve slowly nudged my lunchtime up from 25 to 30 to 40 minutes without anyone commenting, I spend an average of 20-30 minutes a day outside of lunch getting water and brewing coffee, and I can usually manage to fit in one or two “errands” a week that require me to leave the office for between 30 & 60 minutes.
This is the greatest perk of being organised, organised focused productivity leaves plenty of time for organised, productive, delicious unproductivity.
I do perhaps 4 hours of real work per day, focused, good work, leaving me another 4 hours essentially free.
I have just been awarded a pay rise in recognition of my hard work and productivity.
My colleagues spend most of their 8 hours half working, half slacking, are under far more stress, get far less actual work done, have far less credit with our overlords, and from what I can see, have less leisure time than I do as a practical matter; they may technically spend more time not working, but its lower quality & more dispersed, therefore less useful and less enjoyable.
And they don’t know how to knuckle down and grind it out when they really need to, nor do they know how to appear busy when they need to because they never really get busy.
This isn’t just isolated to my office, the average office worker does about 3 hours of actual work per day, but probably feels like they’re working way more than that.
The Secret of Proper Time Theft
The real secret of time theft at work is that lowering your productivity is the wrong way to do it, there’s no point just procrastinating, procrastination is boring, if you’re stealing time you better be stealing it to some end. And you better be doing it properly.
That end could be a side hustle, or catching up on sleep, or reading, or playing games, applying for new jobs, whatever. Other than personal admin I’m currently reading fantasy novels and working on this website, when school starts back up in a few months I’ll be doing coursework on the clock so I don’t need to do it after work.
As for doing it properly, slacking is suboptimal over the medium-long term, it is better to consciously figure out the level where you will be regarded as well above average, but not exceptional, then figuring out the most efficient way to attain that level, so you can maximize your free time.
Your apparently good performance will, in theory, create the impression that you are working like a dog, gaining you some leeway with the boss, all the while not giving the impression that you’re truly exceptional will ensure you don’t get stuck in a position as the goto troubleshooter, and leave you with the trump card of your true maximum productivity in your back pocket, should you ever need to impress.
Manage your employers expectations, so you can work well above them, but well below your actual capacity.
So How Do You Do It?
The first thing you need to find is the bare minimum level of effort required in order to not be reprimanded or get a bad reputation.
If you work in a position where you have a specified clear rate or minimum actions per day quota, this should be easy enough to figure out, in a job like mine it may be a bit more difficult.
I’ve found one of the most interesting effects of the Pomodoro method to be suddenly gaining a very clear, quantifiable metric of my productivity in a job that often doesn’t have definitive end states for tasks and mostly revolves around continuous communication with no clear dividing line between one problem and the next.
I know, based on the number of sessions I complete, how productive I’ve been, from this data and prior knowledge of what’s been expected of me, I can work out a base level of productivity required to do my job to a satisfactory level, a level that will be regarded as “very good”, and the maximum output I can realistically achieve on the average day.
From there, it was merely a matter of determining how best to organise my day in order to hit that “very good” target, while doing as little as possible.
I look for ways to maximise the productivity of my actual working time, and minimise the gaps between my non working time for best enjoyment/utility, in doing this I take into account who else is around and when, factor in my known calls and meetings, and plot out any other unavoidable time sinks like travel. I made sure that most of my time spent actually working was in the timeslots where I was more likely to be actively witnessed or supervised.
I looked to minimise the time I spent doing work related activities outside paid hours, i.e. the amount of time I spent travelling to and from work those days I was in the office and cutting out as many opportunities to be dragged into working outside paid hours as I could.
Then I put it all together, for me this meant altering my workflow, coming in earlier around 0750, to have more time in the office alone before anyone else comes in, and getting to leave earlier around 1550, minimising the amount of time I spend driving & stuck in traffic, it also means I’m going to the gym earlier, which saves even more time as there is less competition for showers and equipment, and that I’m taking my lunch before everyone else, then am back at “work” while everyone else is at lunch.
It meant being more assertive with phone and teams status to avoid those last minute and over lunch phone calls and sudden urgent meetings about non urgent bullshit. It meant ensuring that if I had something to do for the boss, I forwarded it when they’d definitely see it right away, so they could phone me right away, to ask me any questions they had, so I know they come away knowing what a great job I’m doing, and probably won’t be phoning me during my me time.
Finally, it meant knowing when to tread water and give the impression of being buckled under, sitting at my desk reading, waiting to submit a piece of work I’ve had done for hours 15-30 minutes before it would have been really missed.
The TL:DR
If I were to bullet it out, my process looked like this:
- Identify core responsibilities
- Identify hours required to achieve said responsibilities
- Aim for those hours +20%
- Identify unobserved/low-obs/high-obs working hours
- Plan working day around working hard during high-obs, not working as much as possible during other hours
- Look for safe ways to maximise no/low-obs hours
Doing any one of these measures is standard corpo shit, but putting them all together has made a dramatic difference to my effective work life balance.
I used to work hard, earnestly, every day, at every job I had, no more, you are effectively punished for it.
Not everything here may be applicable to you, not everything may be safe to implement, but you should try and implement as much as you can, its your life, give the bastards as little of it as you can.
I’m drafting this at work BTW. :^)
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I’m so sorry I wrote this but I’m not taking it out. ↩︎