Need a break from work at work? But wish to maintain that hardworking impression in front of your boss and colleagues? Here are 10 tips on how you can pretend you are working at work, without people knowing you are actually taking a break!
1) Keep a serious, intrigued and focused facial expression.
Always appear to be working and deeply entrenched in your work matter. Move about a lot, don’t sit idle too much. Shift around from time to time to look like you’re thinking. Take deep breaths. Inhale deeply and exhale loudly, it shows the stress that you’re enduring.
2) Prepare Decoy Screens
Don’t forget to expand your spreadsheets and leave it as display when you go to toilet. This is to create an impression that you are doing your work just in case anyone drop by at your desk when you are not around. If possible, set a spreadsheet as your wallpaper.
3) Use Shortcut Key Alt-Tab
Be alert all the time. When you are doing something else on your computer such as surfing Facebook or performing online shopping, make sure to be ready to switch screen to your spreadsheet quickly using Alt-Tab if a colleague who isn’t trustworthy comes visiting your office space. Then, pick up the pace, continue working and start typing vigorously so it sounds as if you are working intensively.
4) Keep your desk cluttered
Keep your desk busy. Give the image of hard work by placing papers, documents, reports, calculator, and stationery on your desk. Position some papers with scribbles in front of your computer. Draw your calendar by blocking off dates and marking appointments on it so it looks packed and eventful.
5) Ask a lot of questions
A proactive approach. Think up a few work related questions to ask your boss or colleagues. Knock on your boss’ door a few times in a day asking for his opinion. Keep this up until they have an impression you are thinking hard for an idea or solution.
6) Send Email to Yourself, Your Friends or Automatically At Night
Yes! Pretend like you have people to respond to and a lot of emails to read and clear. But you are actually sending email to your friends at work or better still to yourself. You can also set up automate email to be sent out at night to create an illusion that “wow this fella is still working at this late hour!”
7) Eat lunch at your desk
You are so busy that you can’t even go to the pantry for lunch. A good way to let colleagues feel that you are burdened by your workload. Keep a sad face so that people will know you have problems with that heavy pile of work stuff that you’re trudging through tragically. Twitching your eyebrows regularly may help.
8) Create Busy Actions In Between
Shift a pile of files, flick open a filing cabinet noisily, drop a whole lot of papers on the floor and moan about “all that work I have to pick up”. Keep going to the photocopy machine to copy documents.
9) Do the Houdini
Bring an additional coat or jacket with you to work. Hang the second coat/jacket over your chair, so that when you are out of the building having that much needed extended lunch, it appears as if you are still in the building, but looks as if you have simply stepped away from your desk.
10) Create a Messy Look
Roll up your sleeves messily, jumble up your hair and unbutton the first button of your shirt so to appear you are so busy. Be sure that you remove your sunglasses and other similar items from your head when returning from out of office adventures. These are dead giveaways that you were away having a jolly good time.
