Ask HN: Have you ever not done anything on work whole day?

My job is to sit and wait for emails to come in. I work with a team of 4 other people who are doing the same thing as me. Whether it is to build a job or make edits to a job, we wait. We have all been working together nearly a decade so we have it down a system: we rotate on who takes the work.

So to elaborate we have jobs and edits. Each Job that comes in goes to the person that came in according to when their shift started. Job #1 comes in at 8 or 9 AM. The very first person to arrive for their shift that day takes that Job. Job #2 comes in. The next person who came in takes it. And so on and so forth.

If a person is working on a Job, they do not take Edits. If no one has a Job, we all take turns taking Edits. If everyone has Jobs, then the person who is closest to being done fills in to take Edits, but if they already took an Edit, the next person who might also have a Job would take that Edit.

Is it a perfect system? It works. Sometimes work is doubled up. Sometimes a Job will come in towards the end of a person's shift. They are excused if they only have 3 or 4 hours left in their shift. Sometimes we can get slammed with several Jobs. Like yesterday, having to work July 3. It was slow all day. No one had any Jobs and very few Edits. My coworker called out, and everyone else from the earlier shifts went home early, while I got to "come in" (WFH) later, so I was the only one covering the shift. I got two Jobs, while everyone else got nothing because it was a slow early part of the day, yet busy later on, and there was no one but me working.

Fortunately, there are days where all the Jobs come in for the day and everyone has one and I might not get one that day. We all still get a paycheck regardless of who does more or less work. Sometimes it doesn't seem fair at times, but it usually balances itself out. At the end of the year, they show the tallies for who has done the most jobs. It's me every year. Doesn't change my paycheck or even help with bonuses.

Basically how I think of it is that I am paid to be on call. My company pays me to sit at a computer and be present and aware for 8 hours a day. By the way, I'm a web designer.

Yes. I have had many weeks, and sometimes even months when I have done nothing.

The root cause for me is ADHD. I'm often distracted to an extreme level. I'll get into work, boot up my computer and then realise it's 5 in the afternoon and I've been reading datasheets for LEDs all day instead of writing code related to work.

Of course this then triggers the anxiety. How do you tell your boss that you haven't done anything? Especially when you have no good reason.

I advise you to nip this in the bud. Try to work out if there was anything internal or external holding you back but if not, don't sweat it. Get away from work, rest, relax and then try again tomorrow.

John Carmack would probably be disappointed, but 25 hours of productive tech work in a week, especially at a typical company, sounds pretty good to me.

There's also something to be said for learning things outside the narrow range of work and having a life outside work.

I've spent about 2 years cumulatively doing absolutely nothing at "work".

There was a funny case where I was assigned to a project that had almost no work and no meetings at all. And in another case I was in a dev support team as a junior, where we had meetings but it didn't matter at all what we were reporting, nobody cared if it took you two months or more for a simple bug.

So yeah I think I have some amusing experiences.

This is a difficult question to answer as I don’t even know if it’s possible to measure this objectively at all.

But in my experience, the people with enough self-awareness to admit they got nothing done yesterday are not the same people who assume they overachieve every other day. I find the least productive people to be the ones who always pretend like they’re super productive all the time.

Self-assessing on this metric may very well be biased. However, your performance is being measured externally. a good manager understands people can have very unproductive days and very productive days, and they should be looking at the broader picture. If someone gets dragged for a single bad day, something is very wrong with the management.