Three Things to Do When You're Bored at Work (Other Than Work)

Hey there.  Being bored at work happens to the best of us. Even if you’re lucky enough to have a boring job without limits on your web browsing, you may still feel like you should avoid obvious gaming in case your manager looks over and sees your screen. If you’ve already exhausted your usual time-wasting routine and you can’t handle one more cat video, try one of these time-wasting activities that sort of look like work.

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Pick Up a New Hobby or Skill

Who says wasting time at work should necessarily be unproductive? If you have an hour or two to kill at your desk every day, now might be the time to teach yourself a new hobby or skill. If you’re thinking of moving on from your current job, what better way to get yourself out of your boring job than to learn a new CV-friendly skill? Whether you’ve always wanted to learn Photoshop or start coding, you’ll be amazed by the range of courses you can do for free on the Internet.

Dust Off An Old Hobby

As well as offering opportunities to learn new things, the Internet is a great place to do online versions of hobbies you’ve always enjoyed. If you love nothing more than a trip to the library, consider getting into eBooks. Unless someone makes an effort to read over your shoulder, your screen will look very studious with those dense blocks of text. If you’ve done your time at the Blackjack table, making a mobile casino deposit could help you boost your income.

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Disguised Gaming

While you’re probably not going to get away with a first person shooter at work, the trick is finding a game on the Internet that looks like it could plausibly be work, or at least work-related. For example, if Wikipedia is considered work-related in your office, you’ll love The Wiki Game. Exploring Wikipedia by sailing its articles like the seven seas, your task is to get from one article to another unrelated article via internal hyperlinks in as few clicks as possible. You can choose a mode to play in, from speed, to the fewest clicks. You can also set challenging limits to keep things interesting.

How about Google maps? What self-respecting office worker doesn’t check something on street view once in a while? Load up GeoGuessr, the game that lets you tour the world using street view. Dropped in an unknown place, your quest is to work out where you are by looking at clues in your surroundings and dropping a pin on a map of the world to indicate your guess. The closer your pin is to your actual location, the higher your score. If a map of the whole world is too daunting, you can downsize to a smaller geographical area and make things a little easier.

If you’re bored at work, the best thing you could do with your time is to polish up your CV, but starting the job-hunt is not always wise with coworkers sitting beside you. These ideas will give you something to do other than pull your hair out.