Yep. I'm in the midst of that. We're in a "busy" season for my clients (mostly finance/accounting people), and I've reduced my output hours per day to a lower amount because I want to be more available for more time so that I can jump on critical issues as they arise. For the most part, you want to jump on critical things regardless of the situation, but right now it's more critical because of the busy season, so minor gripes get sidelined, all of my maintenance and other duties, like projects, scripting, etc, are all on hold, favoring time to resolution over almost everything else. So if I can be free more than normal so that I have the bandwidth to take care of things when they arise, so much the better. I don't want to be distracted writing a script when a critical ticket drops and I miss it by a few hours while the customers are unable to work because I was debugging a PowerShell function.

So my logged hours are down because I refuse to pick up dormant unimportant tasks while I'm idle. I use the time to review all tickets and just patrol the service tickets for critical issues. I have absolutely no reservations about doing it.

I agree, the goal should always be to play doom. Not because you ignore your work, but because there's nothing to do since everything works. IT support isn't here to justify their existence by staying busy. We're here so that when you need help, we can help. If there's nothing to do, then we're standing ready, and if we play doom, or Halo, or literally any other game/distraction/whatever, while we wait, as long as it doesn't impact our ability to respond when needed, then that's fine. That's what everyone should want. If the hardware is so unreliable that you're constantly having to work on it to keep it running, then, as IT, you fucked up.

I'll also mention that there's a paradox in IT: we're expected to do so much and if you just do all the work by hand, you'll be busy all the time. If you leverage scripts and scheduled tasks, you can significantly cut down on your workload. The paradox is that when you don't have those scripts and scheduled tasks, and you're doing everything by hand, you don't have enough time to create the scripts to reduce your workload.

I'll give an example. At a previous workplace, the bossman was very much in favor of doing things by hand, the original business model was T&M. He later moved to a more MSP model, where people are paying regardless of how much time was spent, so my focus shifted to automate everything and drop the ticket load as much as possible. In one such case, we kept getting issues related to a service failing. I don't recall what the issue was, nor what problem it created, but I remember that simply restarting the service fixed the problem. So instead of fielding dozens of tickets a year to restart the stupid service, I added a scheduled task to run a script that would restart the service automatically every week at (some godawful hour) AM, on a Sunday or something. Once that script was scheduled for weekly runs, we stopped getting those tickets.

I have dozens of other examples along the same lines. One of my most proud moments was a script to fix a service where, if another service was running before it, the service wouldn't load properly. The program service just wouldn't start if a system service was running. It was a non-critical system service, but both had to be running after boot time. I had already tried every combination of delayed start, and every time, the program service would fall because the system service ended up running too quickly. So I made a script to shut down the system service, start the program service, and then restart the system service, and scheduled it to run 15 minutes after boot, anytime the system restarted (usually overnight for patching). Once that was in place, complaints of (program) not working after patch day, went away.

I hate repeating process because nobody thought to actually fix the problem, they just patched it back together manually. When faced with a reoccurring problem, I look at how I can stop it from happening; of course I fix it in the short term but as soon as I'm done I'm working on a script that can do it for me, then figuring out the best way to trigger the script so that I don't have to be involved.

No matter how busy you are, finding a way to get rid of problems like that, by any means necessary, is essential; otherwise, you'll be drowning in tasks to fix stuff that shouldn't be broken.

Yeah, firefighter mentalities are terrible.

That said, as someone in software development, wouldn't there be some optimization work you could do? Keeping up with the technology? Preparing training material? Figuring out the next steps for the next improvements to be done to the system? Looking at solutions to better monitor what is going on? Scripts to automate tasks?

I find it hard to believe that things are so static.

Agreed. The time wasted just marking down what you did and how long it took you is incredible. If I get too busy, I look like a fucking slacker because the first thing I just cannot do when I'm too busy is to mark down exactly how busy I am. It just doesn't happen. I'm moving from one task to the next so fast that I barely have time to take a drink, nevermind write a short story about how I did a thing and figure out exactly when I started working on something.

Compounding this, when it's that busy, I'm often flip flopping between tasks, while I wait for a program to install or a file to copy or something, I'm off trying to chip away at something else. When it's slow, I can take a minute while thing copy/load/whatever, and update my notes. My tasks occur sequentially, so it's easy to see, I started on this at 9:30 and working on this and only this until 10:45. Meanwhile when it's busy, I did X from 9:30 to 9:48, then Y from 9:48 to 9:56, then X again from 9:56 to 10:10, then Y from 10:10 until 10:18, then I finish X from 10:10 to 10:45, and finished Y from 10:45 to 11:05.... Yeah, I'm not entering all that time... At best I'm going to guess, at worst I'm just going to not enter anything. Closed/resolved. Worked for unknown time, text entry: "fixed problem" done.

The task of entering time takes more time to do. If I'm too busy trying to put out fires, I don't care what the time sheet says, I care that the fires were put out as quickly as possible. So I look like I did nothing, but I damn near lost my mind trying to get it all done.

This was a major problem at my last job. Not only would I be so busy, jumping from one foot to the other trying to put it fires, but people would continually walk over to my desk and bug me about unrelated crap. 90% of the time they were managers or senior staff whom I couldn't just ignore, or tell them to go away. So now I'm not putting out a fire instead I'm taking to Sally, who is the daughter of the owner, about her stupid Excel issue that she can, has, and could continue to work around, but she wants it to work in a different way that she never learned how to do from the cut rate community college during the business course she took.

I dunno Sally, why don't you fucking Google it? I'm not your personal chat GPT of problem solving shit that's not broken. I'm currently trying to solve a problem that affects hundreds of people, and this issue barely affects one. Can you go away and stop distracting me? But nooooo. If I tell Sally to go away, daddy bossman will hear about it and I'll get pulled into yet another pointless meeting about my "attitude" towards staff, that will only put me further behind on fixing contoso corp's file server, which is preventing them from doing millions of dollars in business today alone. Apparently Sally's feelings are more important until contoso corp changes IT providers because we couldn't meet our SLA with them, which will also be my fault because I'm lead technician on that account.

Fuck.

They can't be bothered to do their job, and escalate tickets randomly to Tier 3 without any triage

Level 1 support teams are universally useless. I think I've ever worked with one that's actually effective.

Can you imagine that in a hospital? "Oh this guy came in with a broken finger, I'd better call the lead surgeon." Now of course the lead surgeon can fix it, of course they can, everyone can fix it, but you can't send the patient back down to accident and emergency because then you get complaints about why you're passing this poor guy around.

The IT cycle of violence.

I write software for car dealerships so have been aware of all of what you said by proxy for some time simply by virtue of having to write time tracking code which handles all that.

It's insane.

I understand why. I have had a bit of insight into how all of that works and short of being a prodigy, you can't really get ahead.

This is why I do a lot of my routine maintenance on my own car. If all I need is a wrench, some materials and a few hours, I'll do it myself. I've become quite skilled with mechanics over the years; I'm sure it's nothing compared to what an actual mechanic knows, but brakes, tire changes/rotations, battery replacements, even coolant changes and thermostat replacements, totally do-able. I could go on with minor repair crap I've learned but you get the picture.

I did a brake job on my SIL's car and discovered that the last person in there didn't lube anything up, I had to beat it with a hammer to get the damn brake pads out. I put the right lubrication in the right places and put everything back together better than I found it. I even did the slide bolts, which I had to break out the torch to get loose. New pads, rotors, slide bolts, slide bolt boots, the whole nine yards. Pretty much everything short of doing the calipers and brake fluid.

I suspect the last few techs that touched her vehicle were trying to move so fast that they didn't bother doing anything to the side bolts even though they would have been obviously in need of maintenance/replacement.

The thing that bothered me is that she sold the car a few months after I spent 10+ hours fixing the stupid brakes. So next time I have to go look at her vehicle, it'll be a surprise for what things were not done, or were not done right.

grumbles

Yeah, they say that.

When you're too busy to actually get your time in and you look like a damn slacker, they'll use it as evidence to say that you don't need any additional help. I've been through this song and dance several times.

Literally give them what they want: fast solutions at the expense of quality. Then don’t worry about it when things eventually break.

You're not wrong, but the problem with this is that the worker will be blamed for the bad quality, not the manager.

In fact, it'll be the manager rating the worker poorly because of the quality at review time, and they just won't care or won't connect the fact that the worker is not being given enough time to have a level of quality that would be acceptable to the manager.

Literally every boss I've had has been like this. I don't think there's a whole lot of IT jobs that aren't at this point. I've worked several and if they're not call centers (a few have been - where call time is factored in), this has been the primary time system, required by all employees.

i'm often sorry i had kids - not for myself, because i love them, but for them.

i'm glad they're not interested in having their own kids, and i hope they are able to stick with it. and hopefully none of them/their partners ever needs an abortion.

This is exactly why I'm opposed to bringing kids into the world.... I mean, have you looked at the world? It sucks. Why would I want to condemn another individual, whom I'm sure I will love wholeheartedly, to suffer through all of this for their entire life?

I didn't have any say in being born and if I had even an impression of what I was in for, I probably would have said no thanks.

The only thing I'm thankful for from my parents is that they took care of me for so long. I'm not thankful that I'm alive and I'm not thankful for being born. That said, I'm also doing my damnedest to be a force for good in the world. I'm not making a significant impact, because I'm just one guy working a menial job, but I'm going my best. If I must continue to be alive, I might as well try to make everything suck a little less.

My advice: fib.

Not really, but yes. Fib. Lie. Put down what you think is appropriate. Don't exaggerate, don't over bill, just adjust for what fits.

For me, I refuse to track my time down to the minute. I realized that if I put in 5 minutes for sending an email, I would get credit for 0.08 of an hour, but, 5 minutes is actually 0.083333... of an hour. So I started putting in 6 minutes instead (0.10 of an hour). Rather than be irrationally docked the 20 seconds or so, I'm getting a whole ass extra 0.02h (or rather 0.1666.... of an hour).

I'll do 6 minutes, or anything in 15 minute increments. If it took 7 minutes, that's 15m. If it took 20, that's 30m on the record. If I'm looking for a ticket, or closing a ticket (after my time is entered), or even if I go to take a shit while working on a ticket, that goes in the time entry. I might be in the bathroom, but my brain is working on the problem. I'm not exactly taking a break from working the issue, I'm just trying to brain storm while I'm away from my keyboard.

Every second from the time I start looking for a ticket to work, to the time I've closed it, should be on the books. I didn't work from 9:35 to 9:56 on anything, I spent 9:30 to 9:35 finding, and opening the ticket prior to my time entry being started. I spent 9:56 to 10:00 closing the ticket and mentally preparing myself for the next task. Minute by minute tracking is unreasonable, and bluntly, you shouldn't do it. You'll lose more time from what I call "grey time" (doing all the things you need to do in order to account for your time), than you account for actually doing your job. Reading email, looking at documents and keeping up to date on technology issues.... All of that is grey time.

I've put in time for internal meetings, "ticket review"s, even "reading email". None of which has every been questioned. You need that time to simply keep yourself organized. Don't hesitate to mark it down and bill it to your own employer. I know they don't want you to do that, it "artificially inflates" your worked time, but bluntly, if they're going to require that you account for so much of your day that you can't have grey time anywhere in there, you're doing yourself a disservice by not adding some kind of entry to account for it.

The only thing I strictly do not do, is mark down my time for lunch and breaks. That's not acceptable to me. Everything else, sure. But I'm going to pad it to account for my grey time. When I spend too much time doing stuff that I consider grey time, I'll put in an internal entry for it, and bill my employer. I try to keep these to a minimum, but it's an easy entry when you get called into a meeting or something.

Once you start seeing all the losses from grey time adding up, you'll be able to account for 6-7 hours of your day easily. Plus 30 minutes for lunch, and 2x15 minute breaks, and you're missing an hour of your day at most.

Grey time. Log it.