Overheard two people in the break room talking about how they just zone out for hours

I was grabbing my sad little yogurt from the fridge and these two from accounting were just chatting. One of them said, 'Yeah, I just put on my headphones and stare at the spreadsheet. Sometimes I look up and three hours have gone by and I've done maybe two things.' The other one laughed and was like, 'Same, I call it spreadsheet coma.' Idk, it just hit me how normal that is here. We're all just clocking in to basically be warm bodies in chairs, pretending to be busy. My job is processing these vendor invoices and half the time the system is down, so I just refresh the page over and over. It's not even hard, it's just empty. Made me wonder if everyone feels this weird guilt for getting paid to basically do nothing most of the day. Does your office have a name for that zoned-out, fake-work state?

2 comments

2 Comments

drew_jenkins5414d ago

Actually find that zoning out time super useful for problem solving! My brain needs those quiet stretches to connect ideas that don't come when I'm rushing. Calling it "fake work" misses how much mental ground you cover just thinking. That spreadsheet coma might be when someone's best idea for saving the company money finally clicks. We don't have to look busy to be doing good work.

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sethtorres14d ago

Problem solving needs structure though, not just blank space. If everyone zones out waiting for ideas, nothing gets built. You need to actually open the spreadsheet and test the idea, not just think about it. That quiet time often turns into wasted time without clear goals.