How To Slack

You want a spreadsheet. You need a spreadsheet.

I always have a spreadsheet open when I am at work. Excell Spreadsheets are synonymous in the business world with busy work. Emphasis on busy.

An excell spreadsheat on your computer shows that you are working on something, rather than nothing. The actual content of your spreadsheet is irrelevant.

Always keep your spreadsheet ready to click to with non-maximized windows, as mentioned in this post.

Advanced:

Add color to your spreadsheet. If you have highlighted cells in your spreadsheet, it gives the impression that you are working on something important, because it is so important that it needs to be COLOR CODED.

If you don’t have a spreadsheet, make one. A good thing to make a spreadsheet about is how you will spend your lottery winnings (when you win of course). Design it so that you enter in your total winning amount, and let it calculate how much you get to spend on houses, cars, booze and women, etc.

On most computers, you can quickly change your screen saver settings. The important thing that we want to pay attention to for the purposes of slacking is the amount of time before the screen saver comes on. When you are working at your desk, set this to a very low amount of time, no more than five minutes. You WANT the screen saver to come on WHEN YOU ARE AT YOUR DESK.

Now, here is the important thing. If someone comes over to ask a question, go to your computer and shake off the screen saver with your mouse or keyboard as you answer the question. You can do this as if you are looking up the answer, or you can do it as if you are busy and need to multitask. It doesn’t matter. What matters is that people see the screen saver, and see you shake it off.

What is the purpose of this?

Well, the other day, I went to have coffee with a friend and catch up on a few things for an hour. If I change the screen saver so that it NEVER comes on, people walking by my desk will get the feeling that I am around, just not at my desk at the moment. You see, people have incidentaly seen that I have a screen saver on my desk. When they walk by and see that I am not there, but neither is my screen saver, intuitively they will think I musty not have been gone long.

This will be true in the first minute of that hour-long coffee break as well as the last.

Look up in the corner of your window. Right next to the X in the red box. Do you see a big square in that box, or two smaller, overlapping squares in that box?

If you see the two smaller overlapping boxes, that is the wrong answer.

Never maximize your windows. Why? Let me count the ways.

1. You can overlap windows, making it easy to click on an excel spreadsheet (more on this to come) to bring it to the front of your screen when your boss walks by.
2. You can put more windows on your screen, making you appear busier
3. With more small windows you have on your screen, it is harder to tell what is in each one. This way you can mask your slacker activities

Computers are ubiquitous with office work. They are also ubiquitous with wasting time, diversions, and fun. Raise your hand if you have ever used your computer at work to check your personal email, read the news, or download a song from iTunes.

Everyone? Good.

Our computers are often very public. Everyone can see what we are looking at and what we are working on. If you are writing a memo, everyone can see. If you are browsing some random blog that you found on technorati, everyone can see.

Keep this in mind. Your computer can work for you or against you. Your computer will most likely be the most often used item when you are slacking, but it can be the biggest giveaway that you are slacking to people walking by.

Computers are so important that they will get their own catagory to keep track of strategies and techniques to employ with your computer.

This website will share practical advice, strategies and techniques to truly slack off.

How do you do nothing and get paid for it? How do you make people want to give you raises? How do you make more and more salary for less and less work?

We’ll figure out how.