The easiest way to love your job is not to do it. Here are the top 10 ways to avoid work at work.
1 Ignore all emails
Working in the mail room is not generally a career choice for most people. Yet with the epidemic of email most people spend half their working lives slaving away in their own personal computer mail room. However, if you let emails sink to the bottom of the pile and go unanswered they will eventually become irrelevant. If something really matters, the person who sent it will eventually call you to ask about it.
2 Never offer to make coffee
In an open-plan office there is a ritual where everyone waits hours for the first person to say: “Who wants a coffee?” That person then finds themselves in the kitchen for the rest of the day working as a junior catering manager. Also remember that nobody ever gets to the top of an organisation by drinking stinky teas. No one wants to have a meeting in a room that smells of peppermint, rhubarb or aloe vera.
3 Get yourself noticed
Getting ahead in business means getting noticed but working hard makes you almost invisible. It’s a lot better to work hard at getting noticed. What senior management likes more than anything else is junior managers who show initiative and volunteer to do things. Of course, volunteering for things and doing things are two different matters. Once you have got the credit for volunteering for a project, get as far away as possible from it before the work kicks in. The best way to do that is to volunteer for another project.
4 Remember that less is more
You would think lazy people form an inert mass at the bottom of an organisation. On the contrary, they are found at all levels in business, right up to the boardroom. The reason for this is simple: when something goes wrong in business it’s generally because someone somewhere has tried to do something. Obviously, if you don’t do anything, you can’t be blamed when it goes wrong. People who sit all day like a lemon, busily straightening paperclips, are therefore the only people with a 100 per cent record of success and with that sort of record promotion is inevitable.
5 Master the jargon
It’s vital you know that for the envelope to be pushed out of the box and through the window of opportunity, customers should first become stakeholders and then delighted beyond their expectations. To do this, top executives will go forward the extra mile while wearing the shoes of the customer. And remember, the customer is king (unless she is a woman).
6 Manage without bosses
The difference between a boss and your bank is that a bank sometimes gives you credit for things. Bosses give you things to do and then blame you for doing them. What they never understand is that if they didn’t give you things to do in the first place, you wouldn’t make so many spectacular foul-ups. Naturally there are good bosses and bad bosses. Some take the trouble to get interested in what you are doing, encourage your personal development and provide you with a stimulating and challenging work environment. There are also good bosses who lock themselves in their rooms, have five-hour lunches and leave you completely alone.
7 Avoid paper
Steer clear of all paper as the thing it’s most likely to have on it is work. There is a saying that a job is not finished until the paperwork is done. It’s a saying that is not used much these days because most people’s entire job is paperwork. You can finish your paperwork and it will have multiplied and be back on your desk by the following day.
8 Never answer a phone
Answering a phone in an office generally means speaking to a customer or your boss. As neither will call unless they want something, answering the phone will probably mean doing work. Don’t pick up a phone unless you know it’s a social call. As you will never know whether an incoming call is social or not, it’s best to make a lot of pre-emptive outgoing social calls.
9 Say no to networking
In business, they still say it’s not what you know, it’s who you know, which is a bit depressing when you have just completed 15 years of formal education. Networkers give you their card within the first 30 seconds of conversation. After about 20 minutes telling you how brilliant they are, ask whether they would like your card. Then return their own to them and watch them slip it straight back into their pocket.
10 Steer clear of meetings
Half of every working day is spent in meetings, half of which are not worth having, and of those that are, half the time is wasted. Which means nearly one-third of office life is spent in small rooms with people you don’t like, doing things that don’t matter. A tightly run meeting is one of the most frightening things in office life. These are meetings for which you have to prepare, in which you have to work and after which you have to take action. Fortunately, these meetings are as rare as a sense of gay abandon in the finance department.
