Resources
I think a lot of companies have a fundamental misunderstanding of the knowledge workers they employ. New employee orientations often warn against “personal use” of the company internet connection during working hours. This “while you’re at work, you should be working” philosophy works fine if you’re welding truck frames, but if you’re truly getting paid to think it’s an absurd slice of utopia.
I’m not busy all the time. Sometimes I kick back and read some news to unwind from a task, and a lot of times this is when I come up with an improved plan for the next job. People who are working nonstop often seem scattered, unfocused, and inefficient.
I remember “wasting” some time at work back in the States researching graphviz, probably thinking it might help some hobby project I was mulling over at the time. I ended up using it in one of the best projects I did in that job. I learned Python during one of my summer internships, and I have used it to produce a few automation projects that would be otherwise unworkable in our lockdown environment here.
If knowledge workers are actually in the business of acquiring and applying knowledge, then half the time we should probably be viewing them as academics or researchers rather than worker bees. Absently consuming an entire day with e-mail reading (and over- or under-sorting), droning telecons, and spreadsheet monkeying mutes the value of a college education and decent intelligence, which garnered the big professional salary and desk job in the first place.
But the truth is, most supervisors (all of mine) understand this and generally support self-guided personal growth, even if it’s not even pointed at a current company objective. There’s a stigma, but it’s only enforced at the extreme in practice.
It’s also important to equip these workers with the proper tools. At a prior job, we needed VP approval to get a Blackberry, and I’m still on a “User” profile computer that doesn’t allow a program besides Internet Explorer to access the internet, and installing something like Python is out of the question. Policy is one thing, but I have lost countless hours designing workarounds to these limitations.
Most notably, I wrote a VBScript application that launched an instance of Internet Explorer to download a file, scraped the data out of the browser control, and wrote it to standard output, which the calling Python script collected and performed analysis afterwards. This would have been accomplished in a single function call if I had been able to use the basic functionality of Python (the proxy made this impossible).
Postscript: It’s interesting to me that I long ago grouped work and academics together for the relevant tag in my blogging.