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PaperclipPerfector  3d ago (text post)   1121 thread views

Wellness Wednesday for October 22, 2025

The Wednesday Wellness threads are meant to encourage users to ask for and provide advice and motivation to improve their lives. It isn't intended as a 'containment thread' and any content which could go here could instead be posted in its own thread. You could post:

  • Requests for advice and / or encouragement. On basically any topic and for any scale of problem.

  • Updates to let us know how you are doing. This provides valuable feedback on past advice / encouragement and will hopefully make people feel a little more motivated to follow through. If you want to be reminded to post your update, see the post titled 'update reminders', below.

  • Advice. This can be in response to a request for advice or just something that you think could be generally useful for many people here.

  • Encouragement. Probably best directed at specific users, but if you feel like just encouraging people in general I don't think anyone is going to object. I don't think I really need to say this, but just to be clear; encouragement should have a generally positive tone and not shame people (if people feel that shame might be an effective tool for motivating people, please discuss this so we can form a group consensus on how to use it rather than just trying it).

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Does anyone else feel guilt over not working the full 8 hours in a laptop job?

Even though I do something very provably useful, and bring in millions for the company while being paid basically entry level, doing something that requires (imo) rare talent, I still feel a lot of guilt that I tend to work only 4-6 hours a day.

Most people I’ve talked to fall into two camps, either telling me it’s fine and I should slack more, or that I have a fake email job and should join a startup instead. Sadly I did the startup path for many years and got burned pretty hard.

Anyway, seems like most others in my corporation also don’t work a full 40 hours but, I detest this sort of fakery most of us feel forced to do. I wish I could be honest about how I do the tasks I’m assigned, often going above and beyond, but it just doesn’t take me 40 hours.

My company is planning to adopt MS Team, any tips on gaming it so I appear more active than not?

Any of the following:

  • Build a physical mouse-jiggler (works best when you just click the MS Teams UI directly; interacting with other programs doesn't always register as activity).
  • Schedule meetings and focus time that will make you show up as busy. You can go the extra mile and join your fake meeting with no participants and have the video call run while you're absent. Just make sure you don't invite anyone and keep your camera off; would be embarassing if they joined and saw you snooze.
  • Actually work 8 hours, go above the above and beyond the beyond, and leverage the additional performance for a higher salary OR the same salary with fewer nominal hours.

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