A Busy Day at Work

Well, I had stuff to do. Now I find myself with an hour and fifteen minutes still to go and I am bored! I was instructed by Sarah, who is away today, to call her if I needed something to do. I have done so, several times, and to no avail. I know the people around me are busy and I keep asking them if I can help, but it would appear as though I am of no use to anyone. By trying to be helpful, I've put myself in a bit of an awkward situation; I am just dicking around and my overworked, stressed out colleagues KNOW that I am just dicking around. It really makes me feel guilty; guilty enough to open up Word and start typing while occasionally glancing at the Corporate Vehicles document sitting next to me in a vain attempt to appear to have found something important to do. Every so often I pause from typing and flip through the document with a pensive look on my face; I think that's a nice touch.
I've already written my abnormally long email today, spent a necessary amount of time on facebook, read through a stranger's blog, read through a friend's blog, and caught up on the last month of Gofugyourself.com entries. I don't know what happened. I was so busy this morning! We have a microsite we have to roll out this weekend, so Val and I were left to double check the consistency of the pages in regards to formatting, information, and branding. We had to work through 5 - 8 WebPages of varying length per a total of 22 countries. Val (who is in charge of this one) was worried it wasn't going to get done. She had me burning through those like wild fire; which is fine, I rather enjoyed my morning - I like when I have something that has to get done - but now I find myself with nothing left to do. Where is the bloody fire now?! Val is still working on bits and pieces of it, but it seems as though my area of expertise (mindless labour) is no longer required.
In short, through an exceedingly high level of efficiency and productivity, I have worked myself out of a job. I vaguely remember having a conversation with Ben about this a few years back, when he was working at a law firm one summer (funny, now I work at a law firm). He had observed that his peers and colleagues worked at an alarmingly slow pace, which he originally chalked up as laziness and/or incompetence. It wasn't until a few weeks into it that Ben started to realize the benefits of slowing down your productivity in order to extend your work load over longer periods of time. I guess this had just slipped my mind until today. I should not have been so hasty in my work! It was wrong of me to work as quickly and effectively as I could in order to not only meet, but beat, the deadline that was given to me. Why, oh why, did I think that was a good idea?
Now, I'm not saying you should slack off, or ever just do the bare minimum. One hurts thos you work with and the other is simply lazy. You certainly aren't going to climb the corporate ladder with only 15 pieces of flair. BUT, there is something in the idea of always being busy vs. always looking for something to do.
Say you are an over achiever and you accomplish all your boss gives you to do in the first two hours of your day. What next? You have to go ask for more to do. In the beginning, I'm sure this makes you look like a stellar employee, but after days, weeks, months of you having to ask what to do your boss ends up thinking, "Why do I always have to TELL her what to do. No one else has to ASK what their job is. I should fire her.". How awful! And all because you wanted to work to your full potential.
On the other hand, lets say you do you work, you do it well, and you do it in your own sweet time (though, of course, you never miss a deadline (without fair warning)). In this scenario, you never have to ask you boss, "what's next". You simply do what you are told, when you are told, and no one can make a complaint about you. When your boss sees you, intensely focused on your computer monitor (apparently amending some Corporate Vehicles document - you look so pensive) he can't help but think, "Now THERE'S and top notch employee. Always hard at work, never has to bother me. I should give her a raise". If you ask me, that's a much better situation to be in.
Unfortunately, this has chipped away thirty minutes of the hour and fifteen I needed to kill. Ironic. I worked too quickly through this post. I gave myself an hour deadline (well, goal really) and I blew it away; cut it in half!
Balls.