I have always been crap at making myself look busy.

At present I am in a position where I’m needing to spin less than an hours worth of work out to fill a full day.

Any tips?

If its a manual job,make yourself dirty.
Always have a pile of crap ready to go in a bin as it looks like you have just tidied.

Getting myself dirty would be just about as bad as not looking busy.

Was going to suggest spending more time on the internet but you’ve already covered that one… 8)

Walking about briskly with some papers in your hand usually seems to work…

A clip board and a hi viz vest walk purposefully point at things with pen draw cartoon animals carry on walking.

make sure no one can see your computer screen.

A lad at work does it well, although its only the bosses he fools.
Has loads of papers spread out on his desk, and shuffles them about at strategic moments 🙂

Small world easygirl, I never realised I worked with you 🙂

I thought she was on about me

Copy stuff you want to read, like bike articles, reviews etc into an email and email yourself at work open up the email and voila, “I am reading a work email” except nobody knows its about bikes/wheel sizes/new cameras/ how to build a word store etc etc

Do more work.

Yeah, always have papers spread about your desk, make sure you type a fair bit, even if you end up deleting it, make sure you open up plenty of different documents so people don’t keep seeing the same on your screen. I had to make a similar workload last a few times in my last job. Learned the hard way not to ask for more in those spells as it meant when we got super busy again I had my normal workload which was more than enough plus the extra I’d been given!!

Shame I can’t get away with that at my current work, that’s just constantly busy!