Things to Do When You’re Bored at Work

Every list of things to do when bored is written for someone at home with a free afternoon. This one assumes the opposite: you have got a few minutes between things, you are on a work machine, and whatever you open needs to be quiet and quick to shut.

So everything here is checked against three constraints: no sound by default, loads in seconds, closes in one keystroke. Nothing that autoplays audio, nothing that needs an account, nothing that takes twenty minutes to reach the point.

Under a minute

For the gap while something compiles or uploads.

• Pointer Pointer — move your mouse, get a photograph of someone pointing at your cursor. Silent. Loads instantly.
• Useless Buttons — a whole collection of single-purpose sites. Most are one click and done.

Worth knowing: Patatap is excellent but makes noise the moment you touch a key. Headphones or skip it.

Five to ten minutes

• Window Swap — the view from a stranger’s window somewhere else in the world. Mute it and it is just a nice window.
• Internet Artifacts — scroll through the history of the web. Genuinely interesting, and it reads like research if anyone glances over.
• The weird websites collection — twenty entries, sortable, all checked.

Something with a stopping point

The risk with browser games is that they do not end. These do:

• A single game of Lichess against the computer — five minutes, clean finish.
• Wordle-style daily puzzles — one per day by design, which is the whole appeal.

Avoid the idle and clicker games in that collection during work hours. Universal Paperclips is brilliant and will eat your afternoon.

Two minutes, and vaguely about you

Our quizzes run about a minute each and end on a result you can screenshot. The browser tab one tends to start an argument in the team chat, which may or may not be what you want.

The calculators are the same shape — move a slider, get a number. The tab hoarding one is uncomfortably accurate.

One honest note

This is a list for breaks, not for avoiding your job. A short deliberate break is genuinely better for the afternoon than half-attention for three hours — but that is a break, not a shift. Also, assume your work network logs what you visit, because it probably does.

Keep going

If it is late rather than mid-afternoon, the night version is calmer. On your phone rather than a work machine, the touch-friendly list drops anything that needs a mouse. Killing time with colleagues, these work over a shared link. And if the honest answer is that you are scrolling rather than bored, there are better swaps.

The full list is sorted by time available, or let us pick something.