So I'm in a job where I'm basically a one person records-keeping department for a big but unconventional? organization. Think of it like a nursing home, except it's owned by all the little old women who live in it.
I don't have to attend meetings, I rarely get phone calls from anyone other than my direct boss who's in an entirely different state and has no idea what I do on a day-to-day. I don't have really any formal training for my position (I just started my grad school program 3 weeks ago, and I was put in charge of this entire division about half a year after starting full time two years ago?) so most of what I do is based on my instincts, the few webinars I've taken and the advice of a consultant who came in a year ago and my boss. Previous to me, they had another recordkeeper who- kind of knew what she was doing but seriously started falling behind and dropping the ball. I don't blame her at all, she was in her 80s, her sister had died a few years previous, and she had health issues that definitely impacted her ability to work. I've made a lot of progress since being the only one down here, but there's still plenty to do and I have No Idea what I'm really doing. And since no one else knows what needs to be done, or how to do it, they just assume I'm doing a great job and working super hard.
Everyone I work for is incredibly lovely, but I simply just- do not have a lot to do? Any new records I get are pretty easily handled and sorted away properly, whether I do it the day of or the next it takes like 15 minutes at most. The rest of my time is meant to be re-organizing and re-processing old records/files, but there's NO instruction on where to start or how to do it because nobody else who works here has any idea either! So I basically work at my own pace and start randomly on whatever 'project' I feel like doing or seems most important at the time (for example, if a committee suddenly sends me a bunch of things then I focus on re-organizing that committee's previous records and adding in the new ones.)
But in reality: I spend a *lot* of my time watching YouTube, tv shows, reading on my phone, and browsing social media during and in between projects. I go through spans of two weeks where I feel like I accomplish a lot, get some project done, and then end up sitting and doing nothing or dragging myself half-heartedly through more sorting and re-filing where I really only spend 2 out of my 8 hour work days actually working. Sometimes I can justify that lazy Friday or Monday, and other times I feel so incredibly bad for it. I'm taking a half-day today for a dentist appointment and hating myself for not spending my whole morning shift working as hard as I can, when nobody cares how long I take on this filing!
And I don't know if it's anxiety behind the idea of getting caught not doing anything, or feeling like I'm letting down all of the nice people I work for, but I'm plagued just sitting here! I only get paid $16.23 an hour (vastly underpaid for what my position technically is, but can I really complain if I don't know what I'm doing and hardly work?) so it's not like I need to be killing myself over this job, but how do I get past the guilt of only working a half-hearted 2 to 4 hours when I'm sitting in my office for 8 5-days a week?