Another way to shield your slackerdom from those-upon-whom-your-continued-employment-depends is make sure that you always have a problem in hand.

In the IT world, this means something that won’t compile, a test that won’t run properly, a jar file file that is missing, etc. Outside of the IT world, choose anything that is a stopping point for what you working on.

Make sure that it something relevant to what you should be doing, its a problem that you could reasonably encounter, and something that you spent some time trying to resolve but then got bored and wanted to surf the Internet instead.

So how do we use this problem? Naturally, when you’ve been slacking off for a few days and not doing anything, you tend to get pretty nervous when your manager pops into your area for a quick checkup.

Before any small talk, I try to distract the powers that be by immediately trying to immerse them in my problem.

Me: “Hey. What’s going on?” Before person can answer, “I’ve been working on fill-in-the-blank for a little while and I’m kind of stuck. Have any ideas?”

Now this is where it is important that what you are working in is a REAL problem. Your boss will most likely give a few suggestion which hopefully you have already tried. After a few more suggestions, I usually shake my head and sigh. “Okay, well I’ll see if I can get any ideas from (random person). It’s driving my crazy!”

Act like you are at your wits end. When your manager leaves, inwardly smile and wait until tommorrow to speak with the person you mentioned. If you manager stops by in the meantime, say you stopped by the person’s desk, but he/she wasn’t around.

And lo-and-behold, you’ve got another day to look for fun things to buy on the Internet.

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