A general question that happens to be my predicament at current. I’m a general safety admin/manager that has automated most of my tasks(emails/excel sheets)
Most days I doomscroll fediverse and lurk irc/matrix channels on the work desktop but am curious about more practical or useful things I should be doing instead. It’s looking like this will be my life for a good while since job market is abysmal and promotions are hyperstagnate(have also hit a wall in improving my scripts). If anyone has any similar experiences, please share and advise, as I feel quite lost and trapped :/


I see lots of people suggesting non-work things, but that gets old fast and depending on your work environment can be stressful as you might get caught “not working”
I’d be trying to take on new projects. Start by getting to know your coworkers. If you have other people in your department, talk to them about what they’re working on, things they’d like to see done. If you’re the lone person in your area of work you could alternatively walk the floor and start talking to anyone who could be the stakeholder for a future project. Learn what their pain points are, where the current practices have blindspots.
You mentioned being a safety admin, I’m guessing that’s industrial safety right? Start looking into whatever the current buzzwords are in the industrial safety field and make it a project you take to your boss and try to get funding. Find ways to improve the current processes and data tracking. If you don’t already use a fancy incident tracking system outside of Excel, start doing some research and getting some numbers from vendors and have a chat with your boss about how using an actual purpose built database can improve compliance (that’s about 70% of my duties right now is managing and configuring my organization’s SAAS risk management database, but we also have ~10k workers in the field so it’s highlighting useful data points in the data we’ve already collected primarily)
Unless your position is stuck below a manager with zero flexibility for process improvement, there’s always new projects to be discovered and started to improve existing processes