Does this actually happen? They’re paying you for 40 hours a week, you would expect that they will have 40 hours worth of work for you to do – and you might expect them to try it on with 50 or 60 hours. Plus if they have very little for you to do, boredom will be the least of your worries as no business can keep you on for fun.

However. Maybe your work year is cyclical and you spend certain months gasping for air and then certain months playing Solitaire on your PC. For the sake of your will to live and – I think coincidentally – to help you get further in your job with this company, there are things you can do. Site point’s Lauren Holliday has advice that is really aimed, I think, at freelance people but if you’re freelance and bored then the thing you should be doing is getting more work in right now.

So while I take her points, I think this is handier when you’re in full-time employment and the issue is not whether you’ll get enough money to pay the mortgage next month but whether you can top your high score in Tetris. One thing she advises that I think applies to all of us, though, is this:

Organize Your Computer. When’s the last time you actually cleaned up your laptop aside from downloading an automatic Mac cleaner app? Your computer works hard so give it the Spring cleaning it deserves during the slow times.

How to Deal with Slow Times at Work – Lauren Holliday, Sitepoint (6 July 2015)

Read the full piece.