50+ Productive Things to Do When Bored at Work

Even though we like our jobs, there come those rare slow moments when you may feel underused if not outright bored. Probably you are in front of your computer – but browsing the web does not help and may leave an unwanted track in your usage logs.  Here’s what you can do to produce some positive results and feel better, too.

You can do some cleaning – almost like what you’d do at home, at least once in a while.

Start with your mailbox. You may have subjects and threads that are unquestionably useless. Find them and delete. If no expired materials come to mind, consider arranging your mail by size – and look at the largest messages. With email, the 80/20 rule works exceptionally well, and you may be able to release 80% of the memory used by your mailbox by deleting 20% of your messages. Right, memory is cheap now, but cluttered storage makes it difficult to locate what you may need.

Do similar cleaning for the files you keep on your hard drive (and in the cloud if some of your stuff is there already).

You may start with a keyword search if there’s a specific “topic” that has expired. Next, you arrange your files by size, or “search” for “gigantic” files. Of course, you make sure that you delete only the ones you do not need. Again, the 80/20 rule makes this triage effective and efficient.

No 1 and 2 were “attention games”. Now is the time to move into self-improvement.

Go through the list of installed programs and uninstall at least one application that does NOT help you be more productive (Sudoku? All those Candy Jelly Beans?..). In fact, this app is a time-waster, and you know it. Kill it: you will feel enthused and productive, instantly.

By this moment, you will most probably get some immediate work to do: return a phone call, attend a meeting, etc. If you still have some unallocated time and want to step up your office self-improvement, run the antivirus and computer maintenance tools that you have on your computer or mobile phone.

These simple exercises will remove the garbage you have collected and make sure that you are ready and equipped to do a great job. In addition, it will boost your mood: Imaging yourself sitting in the middle of your apartment, sunny and clean, with the chore list finished.

Originally published on UpJourney.