Employee is forced to clock 13 hours shifts with nothing to do, is left more exhausted than a hard day's work

JR Atkinson • Writer and Editor

May 9, 2026 9:00 PM EDT

Sometimes doing nothing is even more exhausting than doing something.

Maybe this has happened to you, where a day with nothing to do ends up draining you more than a day packed with activity. You know what they say: a body at rest tends to stay at rest, and a body in motion tends to stay in motion. This is true for our daily activities as much as it is true in the world of physics. If you have nothing on the calendar, then your body relaxes into itself, and you're lulled into a sense of sleepiness. You know this if you've ever put on a movie after a hard day and then immediately fall asleep because you're sitting in a comfortable position and the lights are dim. But this is true even at work. You would think that most employees would relish the chance to be less busy than they are. And this is true to a certain extent. Who wouldn't want some of their workload offloaded onto somebody else? Who wouldn't jump at the chance to have their responsibilities cut in half? But this doesn't always have the desired effect.

via Tim Gouw

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Required to be at work for 13 hours... but there's no work to do.

via Weary-Ambition42
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via Weary-Ambition42
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Sometimes, with nothing to do, the hours and days roll by even more slowly. And when you're at work, you want the time to pass as quickly as it can. You want the day to be full of activity, but not so full that you're bursting at the seams. So when you end up in a job that doesn't give you much to do, it might be more exhausting than one that did. That's the situation that this employee found themselves in when they were continuously logging 13 and 14-hour shifts with nothing to fill them with. It would be one thing if you could dedicate that time to other activities, like reading or learning another language, but when you're having to sit at a desk pretending to be., but when you're having to sit at a desk, pretending to be busy, those things tend to slip away. So they reached out for advice from people on the Internet, who at some point or another found themselves in the same situation. Keep reading to see what they said.
Commenters gave ideas on how to use the time.

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via Quilia

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