Rules of office lethargy

My week of office freedom is coming to an end. This whole week my boss has been on travel so I've spent my days playing the trash throwing game, drafting my fantasy football team, researching TiVo, and of course writing blogs. However, my boss (who has a striking resemblance to the guy in the trash throwing game) will be back next week and I will be forced to go back to pretending like I'm busy. I've come to realize that this is something I do fairly well (pretending to be busy I mean). So here are my rules for anyone who wants to impress their boss by hardly doing any real work.

1. Look busy. Keep some sort of Word document or Excel spredsheet on your desktop (computer or real desktop) at all times. This is for emergency visits from the boss. Make sure you can pop them up on your screen quickly so it looks like you've been working on it all along. I like to use Microsoft Outlook. That way it always looks like I'm checking/reading emails (very important part of government work).

2. Be alert. If you wear headphones, keep one ear open. This is absolutely necessary. Bosses have a way of sneaking up on you while you're not paying attention. I find that having my headphones on one ear allows me to listen to music and game sounds, while still being able to tell if someone is walking towards my cubical.

3. Be smart. Make sure your computer screen is at an effective angle. By this I mean that your boss can't see your screen when he immediately walks into your cube. This is to give you some extra time to get something work related on your screen.

4. Do some work you lazy bastard. Try to get something done. I'm talking 10 to 30 minutes of work per day here. Make a couple of phone calls, make a slight revision to a chart, clean your desk, anything. This way, if your boss askes you what you've been working on, you can sound like you've been productive and you don't have to make anything up.

5. Pace yourself. Don't do too much work in one day. Your boss will get really high expectations of you and this will haunt you the rest of your days.

6. Here is my favorite. Try to schedule yourself to show up to work at least an hour before your boss does. This means you can be up to an hour late and your boss will never know. This is assuming you don't have any jerks for coworkers who will tell on you.

I'm sure I've got some more, but I'm too lazy to think about it. I don't want to spend my last free day getting too much accomplished. I think I'm going back to looking up TiVo stuff.