The Art of Not Working at Work
It's a problem that's hard to solve: since the amount of work ebbs and flows, how do you keep your staff busy for 40 hours a week?<p>Some companies drastically overcommit on a permanent basis, so that 40 hours is the minimum anyone's ever scheduled for, and when there's a lot of work, everyone's on massive overtime.  These jobs can suck--these are the ones where you can end up working 100+ hour weeks on occasion, and 80+ hour weeks for months on end.  Ironically, I find these are also the places where people are most likely to "look busy" in an attempt to protect themselves.<p>Some companies overcommit on a short-term basis, but make an attempt to average 40 hours in the long term.  A lot better, and <i>way</i> less likely to burn people out, but still periods of suckiness.  But there's a lot less need to look busy--and there will be periods of undertime, where people are just kind of dicking around.<p>The best job I ever had, the manager attempted to commit to 40 hours of work during peak times.  But during down times, instead of letting us idle, he had us actively work on infrastructure and self-improvement.  Build better tools, evaluate new tools, benchmark things, upgrade things, document things, etc.  He was good at making this productive, and not "busy-work" (which is the pitfall).  As time went on, these investments paid off, and we got faster and better and our 40 hours of work went a long way.  And as far as I can tell, nobody ever attempted to "look busy", as the actual job was enjoyable.  Sadly, this could not last, and when the dotcom crash took us down the group was dissolved. :(