How do I deal with being “overemployed?”
September 12, 2023 8:56 AM   Subscribe

Over the past several years I’ve transitioned from being involved in the day to day at work to being increasingly higher level internal strategy. Oddly this leads to a lot of “nothing to do” and is driving me nuts. I have a lot of anxiety and it turns into disinterest in days and weeks I may work a half hour. My company culture actively discouraged innovation that’s not approved or helping other team members without a formal approval process. I have a constant fear of being laid off and the irregular hours are not helping.

For simplicity sake I was involved in project based work that had an obvious deliverable. 6 months of work followed by a few weeks of taking a break are no big deal. Now I’m with the ebb and flow of sales process. I’m either completely booked or o have nothing coming up. I normally would take the time to learn new skills or work on a sales deck, maybe even going back to programming. My laptop is incredibly locked down and I need a billable code to work on anything. If I do something that is not billable it’ll be thrown out or worse I’ll be asked why I was working on something that didn’t have a legal review. This is discouraging and really hard to manage my hours. Going from zero work to 12 hours of work is hard to do.

There’s a lot to unpack here but when I do have work I have no agency in it as the company is so large that my work is basically data entry. They don’t want or care about whatever is not in their approved way of doing things. Even executives I talk to and colleagues complain about the work being turnkey and while some people claim to be busy it is clear they also have a classic Office Space type job.

I work remote and haven’t talked to my boss in a year. I always offer myself up to help out on anything really but am met with silence. This seems like an ideal role but being “on call” is actually worse than working a regular schedule. Getting out is something I’m working on but it is hard to feel the anxiety of imminent layoffs because there’s a certain graduate student syndrome.

Actually I should say that I do get feedback in the form of yearly reviews conducted by a team of people I don’t work with who just run numbers on billable hours and sales and don’t consult people I work with. It’s very spreadsheet based reviews and it’s obvious everyone is trying to game the system. Say I’m on a presentation instead of doing your best people do the least they can to make their numbers look good. It’ll be riddled with obvious spelling errors but you’ll have 30 people on a call that are silent and the only thing they’ll ask for is a bill code. I can’t even get anyone to small talk in the morning, like “how was your weekend?” Any travel requests to meet people in person get denied. The only way executives even get to say a Salesforce conference is have the client pay for it.

The environment is clearly dysfunctional and toxic, but my question is given I literally have nothing to do and no one seems to care, yet I need to be available, how do I deal with time not working thinking someone will find me out and I’ll be terminated?
posted by geoff. to Work & Money (14 answers total) 1 user marked this as a favorite
 
Use that time to update your CV and job hunt.
posted by emd3737 at 9:01 AM on September 12, 2023 [4 favorites]


Just look busy when people come by and be helpful on the rare occasion to called to help! I’m sure you’re doing this already. Good luck with your search for a new job. The situation you describe sounds very frustrating.
posted by smorgasbord at 9:07 AM on September 12, 2023


you can still learn and do stuff, just not job-related things on the work laptop. If you don’t have a private computer/laptop/tablet, you can use books and paper or listen to audiobooks on your phone. If you work remotely, this should be feasible.
posted by meijusa at 9:15 AM on September 12, 2023 [2 favorites]


I also had a job that I hated in a similar way for a year and a half and would recommend skimming the first couple chapters of this book: Bullshit Jobs by David Graeber.

The short of it is that there isn't a way to prevent it hurting your psyche and you'll need to find a new job.
posted by just.good.enough at 9:32 AM on September 12, 2023 [5 favorites]


In my experience with a similar job, the root of the problem is that they need you to bill but they don't support you in billing. It's a sick system. I've had other kinds of bad jobs but that kind of job was particularly toxic and I developed bad habits I'm trying to defeat today.

There are many jobs that are seasonal or cyclical but management recognizes that and supports their employees during slow periods.
posted by muddgirl at 9:43 AM on September 12, 2023 [2 favorites]


Seconding Bullshit Jobs - it's not a self-help book or anything, but it will help you feel less alone and realize that this is an extremely normal and common social phenomenon.
posted by windbox at 9:53 AM on September 12, 2023


Get a new laptop that isn't locked down and start personal projects on that. Don't think of this as your full time job, as it isn't. Don't take on any other paid gigs if the terms of your employment forbid it, but do find a way to work on personal development during your absurd amount of paid downtime.

Take a look at your bucket list: Now is the time to work on some of that. You probably can't backpack in Nepal, of course, but you can write a novel, become buff, get psychotherapy, learn to read Chinese, and learn to write music. And you can work on your work adjacent skills, such as taking on line courses in business management, statistics, or what ever could potentially be useful for your career on line.

However you mentioned that you had already been taking the time to learn new skills and it wasn't working for you, so look into ways to handle burn out. You have a heck of a lot of those symptoms. You don't have to be constantly overworked and responsible for everything to end up with burn out. You sound really, really bored, and likely anything you can think of to do that should enhance your abilities to do this job is a dead end because the job doesn't want you doing that. So think in terms of secondary income streams, future income streams, or better yet, self care and personal self development.

What are you really bad at in life? Do some research on that and figure out why you are bad it, and why the methods used to teach it to you didn't work in your case. Hint: It wasn't for lack of trying. If you can figure out why you are really bad at it, you can start to think of workarounds that use the aptitude you have.

Give yourself permission to check out of the job when there is no work. Any time you do spend at work tasks is your fire drill practice for when they create the deadline conditions you will later face, so that time is important - but once you have put in your hour, or logged in and checked there is no impending crunch time, your loyalty to the company paying you to be bored while available when they want you, requires you to keep from going buggy with boredom. A good employee figures out how to provide the necessary lip service to make their managers' lives easier. Only a really dumb manager does not understand it is lip service and actually expects you to be toeing that line.

Watch out for getting addicted to some kind of media. If you are spending all your time listlessly scrolling your phone, or gaming, you are contributing to your sense of futility and raising your anxiety level because you know its a waste of time and it is so familiar now it's not actually giving you any positive benefit. It's especially bad because getting addicted to media will mean you will struggle to focus when the company throws the 12 hour days of crunch time at you.
posted by Jane the Brown at 10:00 AM on September 12, 2023 [13 favorites]


What Jane said. This kind of job with an enormous amount of downtime can be a gift. You just have to take a step back from identifying with the job too much. The job is something you're obligated to do for a paycheck, but it doesn't have to define who you are. Invest passion, energy, and time in other things -- art, music, or some other type of activity.
posted by Artifice_Eternity at 11:17 AM on September 12, 2023 [1 favorite]


The very worst portion of my life in-regards to mental health was 2007-2010 where I was paid a lot of money to basically do 4 hours of work per week as a fully remote employee. I basically became a full time World of Warcraft player. I'm a software engineer, and if it wasn't basically impossible to find a new job during most of that time, I would had gladly took a job that paid far less for more work.

It was terrible for all the reasons you mentioned. I couldn't innovate, I couldn't make things better, and I was basically told that if it only took four hours a week then oh well I guess that's just how it goes. I tried just acting like I was prematurely retired, but over the years I got more and more emotionally involved in solving the incompetence at my company, and towards the end I basically spent 30+ hours a week being so angry I had vision problems. I was literally seeing red. My daughter was going to be born summer of 2010, so I basically just forced myself to find a different job because there was zero chance I was going to survive being a new father if I was spending basically every waking hour pacing my house getting mad a something I couldn't change no matter how aggressively I tried.

Anyway, long story short, I suggest spending all your downtime finding your next job. Getting paid to do nothing sounds great in the abstract, but eventually it might take a tool on your soul.
posted by Back At It Again At Krispy Kreme at 11:18 AM on September 12, 2023 [3 favorites]


IMO, you are given a gift to do less work for the same money, and it's remote, not chained to a desk, you take it. Do whatever with your spare time. I like the idea of getting a 2nd computer (I have that at home) and do programming or spreadsheets or learn something new or play games or whatever.

Now if 'remote' equals some other office, so you are at an office location, then that changes things. But at home? Use your time as you see fit.
posted by The_Vegetables at 1:18 PM on September 12, 2023


Response by poster: Thanks all, I really appreciate it. Muddgirl and Back At It summarized it best. I think there’s something unique about being billable and tech that makes this bad. I have to respond to fire drills. Today I received a 3:30 text to jump on a call “your calendar is open.” Setting boundaries is not possible, I might as well quit. Compounding this the bureaucracy is horrible. I can’t use a non approved USB device, I have to call IT to log me into change my required password every 30 days. I asked for a charger that broke and they sent me a new laptop for some reason but no charger. Ontop of the pacing thinking about changing everything I’m also given random roadblocks that takes days to fix it is worse than calling up a cable company. Our devs don’t even know how to use source control and pass around files, but there’s no motivation for change. They might be late and the client will be angry but I’ll get “oh well” responses.

Re: Media you’re absolutely right, I’ll spend all day on Blind or other social apps ostensibly to research companies and compensation but will get a paralysis. I have a personal laptop but have to be “online” for a certain portion of the day. I will move to a model of checking IM/email every hour and get into a schedule of getting personal things done. While this is not sound financial advice I’ll set a date to quit that gives me two years of runway looking for a job if I can’t find one by then. I won’t be rash and spend tomorrow figuring out finances but otherwise I’ll spend all day in bed. I’m forced to update my resume constantly for work, and seek out jobs internally as muddgirl said it is kind of a sick thing and while it might seem it’ll help my job search otherwise has the opposite effect.

Money isn’t a factor as stated above but I began to think every job was horrible, thanks for the advice and kick in the pants. I’ve been contract and/or worked billable all my life but being told you have quotas for billable AND sales and we’re not going to help you AND out coworkers against each other for billable hours is kind of messed up and I was getting tunnel vision.
posted by geoff. at 2:04 PM on September 12, 2023 [1 favorite]


It sounds a lot like the job I just left. Some people thrive in those situations, and I wish them the best of luck but it’s not for me. Sounds like it’s not for you either.

Better jobs are out there. Good luck with your exit plan.
posted by rd45 at 2:11 PM on September 12, 2023 [1 favorite]


Sounds like you wouldn’t have had the no-notice meeting if your calendar had been blocked. Time to book some meetings with yourself whenever you need to get out of the house. Call it “focus time”.
posted by shock muppet at 4:18 PM on September 12, 2023 [5 favorites]


I'm sorry to hear you're in this position and hope you'll get out of it fast. I would recommend cultivating healthy detachment from your job, but it sounds like you're not the type of person who couldn't care less about their job. (I'm not either. I solved the problem by finding a new job.) In that case, I heartily endorse blocking out "focus time" in your calendar, to focus on very important "job things" like taking a nap or exercising. They are very important for your job, because if you don't do these things, you might end up telepathically murdering everyone at work through email by the sheer force of your blind rage.
posted by gakiko at 3:55 AM on September 15, 2023 [1 favorite]


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