How to Work at Work

"What could be more seditious than doing your own work at work? I don't mean leaning out the window to sell hot dogs to the exec in the company on the floor below. I mean maybe developing your own software at work. Or writing a novel—that's what I did, on the extremely rare occasions I held a real job."

John Shirley, an author primarily of fantasy and science fiction, writes on how to do your own work while on the clock at a paying gig, namely writing a novel while sitting in front of a computer. In 1995, you could perhaps even bring in your own computer. "Used to it," you could say. "More efficient on it. Can't learn that other system." That might still fly in some offices, but it's probably not too common.

Instead, you can write your novel in whatever word editor or document space you use for work, and save your documents using some innocuous file name if you're worried someone will look at your saved file history, then move it to a personal USB thumbdrive, email it to yourself, or back it up to a remote file repository. Or don't save files, but copy the text to your personal email account as a draft email, or email yourself. Or download yWriter as a .zip and extract it to a thumbdrive, being sure to take precautions to hide the unique interface (it probably doesn't look like anything you'd use at work, though it may be drab enough to look unthreatening to inquisitive passer-bys.

Or take a pointer from writers in Japan, who were the first to write novels via text from their cell phones. Chapters usually consist of about 70-100 words each due to character limitations on cell phones, so it's also a good practice in keeping things brief. Doubtful of this method? Five out of the ten best selling novels in Japan in 2007 were originally cell phone novels.

If you're worried about any of this, you can take pointers from how to slack off at work and not get caught. No one is on-task 100% of the time, so use that downtime for productive time.