This is a great way to earn a reputation as the office moron. This is a great way to get your supervisor, manager, or co-workers (any of whom might one day be promoted to the other categories) to see you as this obtuse idiot who takes 45 minutes or longer to communicate basic things, the one who's always at their desk doing something but strangely never seems to actually get any work done.
Take it from someone who has hired and fired people. If you really want to minimize effort, don't see it as tricks to avoid doing work. This stuff just gets you a reputation and if not outright fired, gets you passed over for things like bonuses and promotions and you never know when your next job might call your last one before hiring you. See it as tricks to maximize apparent output per unit of input, instead. Oh, and yes, sometimes doing as little work as possible means doing extra work. It's an ounce of prevention kind of thing.
Of course, the following tips are assuming you have zero interest in being an honest or ethical employee and do not have any particular aspiration or ambition of career-climbing in your current job. If that's not the case, just do your job, do it well and eagerly. With that out of the way...
Figure out what tasks are most visible to your boss, and specialize in them, do them better than anyone else. The truth is, no distribution of tasks is equal, and if you specialize in the most visible, urgent, and important tasks, you'll appear to be doing more than you really are and people will think twice before criticizing you since you're doing critical things.
Figure out which tasks absolutely cannot be put off without interfering with others, and which tasks can be safely blown off for a while or delegated. Nobody ever advertises a task as being unimportant, but of course there are less important tasks in a job - as I said, no distribution of tasks is equal. The art of slacking comes down to knowing when to slack, not how to slack. Any idiot knows how to slack, and being good at it is no great feat. It takes more observational skill to uncover when it will be noticed and when it won't.
Take advantage of what you're best at, productively speaking. If you know you tend to blaze through things in the hour or so after your 3PM coffee break, plan on doing as much work as possible then. If there's one task you just seem to fly through, or a task you do well that others struggle with it, do as often as possible. Nobody is equally productive at all tasks, at all times of the day. Do what you're best at and take advantage of the times you work best. Yes, this is actually doing work, but again, it's about maximizing apparent output per unit of input, and sometimes that means actually producing output. Bosses, managers, supervisors do pay attention to your output. It can't be absent.
Never, ever, ever neglect work in ways, places, or times that can be seen by clients/customers, or by your boss's boss - there is no better way to get your ass fired than by pissing off whoever signs your boss's paycheck. Don't think of your coworkers as your peers, friendly and sympathetic people who understand your slacking and sympathize with it. From their perspective, you're the jerk who is making their workload heavier by not holding up your share of it, and you can't know which one will be motivated to do something about it - either right now, or way the hell down the line. Remember, your peer is one promotion away from being in a position to do something about you and people can be surprisingly vindictive.
- Adavaas, 14/12/14Oh, and above all else, never flaunt having free time. It just pisses off everyone else who doesn't like their work and it's important to maintain a good image. Confirmation bias is a job-killer - if you get a reputation of being lazy or avoiding work, then everything you're seen doing that is not work, even innocuous stuff, reinforces that notion in people. It's a lot easier to get away with the occasional laziness if you have a reputation as a hard worker. If you really have no work to be doing, you can take the lazy-but-possibly-deserved route and ask to leave early (at least then you're not seen not working, and I'm sure you'd rather be home anyway), or the brownie-points-but-extra-work route of asking if you can be of use somewhere else. But don't take the video-games-at-your-desk route, that way lies termination.
This is IMHO very good advice. Thought you guys might enjoy this. :) Have fun!
Furthermore, if you like reading these sort of stuff, check this out: http://lifehacker.com/5952456/how-to-master-the-art-of-looking-busy
These are all good advice by the way.
I don't agree to slacking on the job 24/7 but I do agree that nobody can work non-stop for 8 hours (working hours) straight, especially if you're like me who loves to blast through a day worth of work in a couple of hours of extreme hardwork and would like to have the remaining time to slack off and chill.
P/S: I've edited my This War of Mine review with the proper review. You can check it out if you like - there are plenty of nice screenshots! :P
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