I’m 0.2FTE but if I start late or I have to take a longer break I make up the time. If I put on my timesheet that I did four hours, then I did 3hrs and 40 minutes, even if that was over six hours.
For example, today I started at 12:30pm and took a break 13:45-13:55, and 16:15-17:00, and my shift was 5.5 hours, so when I sat back down at 17:00 I was like, right, I have done three hours, I need to work another 2.5hrs, and so that’s what I did.
If the actual *work* is slow and I don’t have a lot to do, then I have permission from work to knit, game or read as I’m waiting for tasks to come in, but I’m there and present for my required time. If it’s *me* that’s slow, I make sure that I am focused and present for the amount of time on my timesheet.
This is, of course, considering actual breaks. Getting a drink, going to the toilet, eating at my desk, going through six links to find the one I need etc. aren’t counted as my formal breaks. If I take 4 minutes to do a sudoku while I’m waiting for something to load, that’s not a break, because I’m still active and if Outlook wasn’t frozen while this 85MB brief loaded, I would be responsive, and when it loads and I can rename it, I am there ready to do so. If I was like ‘right this is going to take a while to load’ and I went and made my lunch, that would be a break, because I’m not engaged in work and I’ll just rename it when I get back.
(And yes, I have to load the entire document to rename it.)
Things that I am also meant to count as work: waiting 40 mins for the program to open, fixing the computer when the software breaks (again), waiting on live chat for tech support, when I’m scheduled to be working and the internet is down, going to the library to see if I can find a book to teach myself excel, teaching myself excel from some random website, and converting 7000 pages of medical images to PDF.
But they get x hrs of me at the computer doing things, even if that’s actually y hours in total.
I don’t think you’re being needlessly scrupulous, but I would challenge whether your not-work is the same as your friends’, and whether their work and their break requirements are the same as yours. It is in my contract that I get two 10 minute breaks within every 4 hours; that’s an accommodation because I get pain from sitting up too long due to osteoporosis, but if it’s a good day I still have to take them, and they have to be 10 minutes in a block away from the computer; they can’t be microbreaks. If I work 5 hours I have to have a 30 minute break at that 5 hr mark and they have to pay me overtime if I don’t take it before 6hrs, so I have to take at least 30 minutes in a row away from my desk; that’s a legal requirement that people in other kinds of roles don’t necessarily get, or may get in a different format. If I spread out my breaks like you and took 4 x 5 minute breaks over 4hrs, then my work would be in trouble because I didn’t get my contracted breaks. (I’d also probably be in pain, but that’s not unusual.) But a lot of people don’t have that kind of specificity around their breaks, or as long as their tasks are done they can flex their time in the way you describe, especially if they’re salaried and not hourly.
