Alternatives to taking a nap at my desk?

May 1, 2007 5:48 AM

I've read all my RSS feeds twice. Help me find distractions to get me through a boring work week?

Every couple months I work a shift consisting of replying to tech support type emails which come in at a rate of say, two an hour. This leaves me with a large chunk of the day with virtually nothing to do. I'm not necessarily looking for games unless they are more of the brain teaser variety. For example, my usual standbys are boing boing, pandora, kottke, and the like. I have audio, headphones, and an internet connection, suggestions?

Note: I realize a similar question has been asked more relating to online games. That's what I did yesterday.

posted by heavenstobetsy to computers & internet (16 comments total)

Reading that through again, I'm realizing I could spend a little time learning how to use fewer commas.
posted by heavenstobetsy at 5:50 AM on May 1, 2007

Why not take the time to make a meticulously crafted FPP here? Looking at your profile I see you have been around long enough to take the plunge.
posted by TedW at 6:12 AM on May 1, 2007

I'm finding things a bit slow myself lately, so I'm teaching myself calculus from free online textbooks. Maybe there's some similar self-improvment or interest learning you could do, instead of just filling the time?
posted by mendel at 6:19 AM on May 1, 2007

I am obviously having a slow day too; you can always go to Gutenberg and catch up on all those classic books you just read the Cliff's Notes for in school, and if that fails, answering AskMe questions about zits can be fun.
posted by TedW at 6:21 AM on May 1, 2007

Forgive my ignorance, but an FPP?
posted by heavenstobetsy at 6:23 AM on May 1, 2007

A Front Page Post in the blue.
posted by TedW at 6:27 AM on May 1, 2007

It's not for everyone, but I've found this to be a lifesaver a few times when things were dead at work - http://www.pitt.edu/~dash/folktexts.html - an online library of folklore and mythology texts. The editor has compiled them into similar myths across nationalities - I personally find it fascinating that so many stories of the same types exist across the world.
posted by librarianamy at 6:45 AM on May 1, 2007 [2 favorites]

Yeah, taking on a small but feasible project will really help the time go by faster. The suggestion of making a front page post here on Metafilter (a few recent examples: this or this) could be ideal. Find a subject that's interesting, do some searches to see if it has been talked about previously, start doing research, finding interesting links related to the subject, compile your notes and research results together into a neat and tidy interesting post, and voila! As a bonus, participating in the following discussion will also take up some time!

In a slightly similar thought, how about learning more about a hobby you wish to start? Make up a Blogger blog, or any type of place for that matter in which to store your findings, then go about crawling the web, gathering interesting snippets, and posting them up. Could be fun!
posted by Meagan at 6:53 AM on May 1, 2007

You could do something good for say a project like Wikipedia. Here is a page on fixing links to disambiguation pages. Basically, this is where people have linked to something that is ambiguous and Wikipedia needs detectives to come in a figure out the intent of the authors and then fix it.
posted by mmascolino at 8:42 AM on May 1, 2007

I have been in a very similar role and I spent a fair amount of my spare time writing little articles I thought might help educate people about computers or the net. You have to make them fun to read or there's no point. People don't want to RTFM. But if you take one interesting subject and make it engaging and interesting to learn about, you might just take one of your users up a notch. Keep your snippets on file and include them as supplementary info at the conclusion of a trouble ticket exchange.
posted by scarabic at 9:22 AM on May 1, 2007

KDice.
posted by nicwolff at 10:12 AM on May 1, 2007

Oh, sorry, right, not games. Still, KDice is fun.
posted by nicwolff at 10:13 AM on May 1, 2007

You could do something good for say a project like Wikipedia.

Just keep in mind not everyone thinks that contributions to Wikipedia are valuable. In fact, I think my two years plus worth of occasional editing there was pretty much a massive waste of my time.
posted by WCityMike at 10:42 AM on May 1, 2007

I work in a call centre with a similar pattern of work load. I have a first generation ipod shuffle (1gig) whic has helped me a lot. It's good because I can plug it into any computers USB and it usually recognizes straight away (any other pen drive would suffice though).

On it i have a heap of music (enough to play for a bit, but leave some space for other stuff), then I also have some short games: Settlers, Civilization for Windows, a heap of portable apps for working on personal projects and some ebooks. I spend most of my time browsing either, Wikipedia, news sites, or work on stuff for my blog. I now play a round of civilization in under 3 hours, it's not exactly the most mind building game since it's not overly complex, but keeps me entertained for a bit.

I also have VLC player on the ipod and a few dvds with divx/xvid movies which I watch from time to time.

But anyway: n-th the reading thing. Come into work each day with a field or interest you want to research, so far I've covered zen buddhism, ww1, ww2 and a lot of Freud.
posted by chrisbucks at 4:05 PM on May 1, 2007

Um... I'm I being silly to suggest reading? Or writing?
posted by poweredbybeard at 7:16 PM on May 1, 2007

Am I
posted by poweredbybeard at 7:16 PM on May 1, 2007