10 Ways to Low-Key Quiet Quit Your Job

This list is for when you want to complain about your job, but you don’t want to do anything to change it. You like to whine with no design in mind. If that’s you, do this:

1. Clock in 5 minutes early and clock out 10 minutes late. A very important distinction here—don’t actually work early or work late, just make sure you’re clocked in while hunched against the wall looking at Instagram. That extra 0.25 hours per shift is how you stick it to the man and take back what’s yours.
2. Move slower. Thinking slower should be a given of quiet quitting, but here I mean physically moving slower. Especially if you work a warehouse job or you’re in a service industry, the longer you take on each task means the fewer tasks you have to do. It’s basic math, people.
3. Once a month, share a pointless idea with your boss. This is an important aspect of quiet quitting your job. You can’t seem like you don’t care about work. That’s too obvious. Instead, suggest things like getting matching corporate T-shirts or redecorating the breakroom. If you work remotely, send out a link to a podcast vaguely related to your industry. You want to seem valuable without going so far as to add value to the company.
4. Send random Snapchats with the crying face filter or just text your bae about how bored you are while leaving a customer on hold. If you’re lucky, the customer may even hang up on you or walk away without buying anything. Less work for you!
5. Ask your supervisor if they can remind you how to do something that you definitely remember how to do. The refresher tutorial will eat up a good chunk of your shift, and 7 times out of 10, they’ll just do it for you! Win-win.
6. Be insanely nice to your coworkers. Bring them baked goods. Learn their birthdays. Praise their jobs well done. The more that people like you, the more they’ll want to do stuff for you, and the less you’ll actually have to do (see point #5).
7. Create a “work” playlist every morning (after you get to work). Don’t reuse yesterday’s, and don’t ever use a premade or algorithmic one. The idea is to get wildly off task while looking for songs that will help you stay on task.
8. Look for typos in the company’s employee manual or handbook. This has two purposes for the seasoned quiet quitter. By reading these documents closely, you’ll discover new loopholes that will allow you to work less and get away with it. Also, if you find a weird issue with the margins or a confusing sentence, your boss will be thrilled to spend time fixing it even though it probably doesn’t matter (see point #3). You’ll be a hero!
9. Never take sick days. In the age of COVID, why would you ever waste a sick day on being sick? Only call in sick when you have other plans or you just don’t feel like doing stuff. If you do get ill, your company will force you to go home anyway, and then you can still collect a check while doing the bare minimum and working remotely in your pajamas.
10. Browse openings for similar roles at other companies. If you hate your current job, you’ll probably hate a new job in the same field—plus you lack the qualifications and work experience to do anything else, plus you’d likely have to take a pay cut for a horizontal move, plus the application looks way too hard and time-consuming. Realizing this will send you into a spiral of debilitating self-doubt and abject hopelessness that will render you ineffective for the rest of the month. You will expect nothing of yourself and soon find that no one else expects you to get the job done either, leaving you isolated in a shapeless, colorless void of inconsequential existence. Again—less work for you!

Or, because spending too long in a shapeless void is bad for your posture, you may decide to actually find a new job. If that’s the case, keep reading.