The employee used the free time to engage in personal activities during working hours.
One employee shared an essay with Business insider, detailing how he adopted this unconventional approach to avoid the office and still meet his work obligations. The employee has resorted to “quiet vacationing”—spending a month abroad with only one week of paid time off—through a mix of cunning and strategy in company policy.
Feeling like they were in a “golden cage” due to the fixed salary and flexible hours, and the frustrating policy that made it difficult to leave, the employee began to “quietly quit.” They admitted that a normal workday for them lasts only one to three hours, depending on the meetings scheduled that day.
“No one at the company has ever raised the suspicion that I am not doing enough work,” said the employee, who added that they generally receive good reviews.
This employee’s team works for a tech company in San Francisco and they manage a database, which provides ample downtime. It was admitted that it was very common to do personal activities during work hours; for example, doing chores, playing video games, or just hanging out with friends. Gradually, this trend expanded to taking vacations without officially logging into PTO.
He went from taking workdays to travel to and from the airport to eventually taking entire days off—like spa days—without logging any time off. Their crowning achievement of “silent shutdown” was taking a month off to go to Italy while only using one week of PTO. He kept up the appearance of working by reading and responding to emails and texts, faking backgrounds in online meetings, and chiming in on the company’s messaging platform.
To give the impression that they were busy, they also asked leading questions during conversations, logged into messaging platforms, flagged the messages, and responded with emojis to show that they were keeping up. “I went to a museum once and every half hour or so I opened my phone to check messages,” said the employee, who claimed to have rarely encountered anything urgent.
The case exemplifies the struggles and opportunities that define today’s workplace, particularly as companies try to navigate the dangers of remote work policies. Read the full story on Business Insider, directly from the essay.
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