Every minute of every day isn’t filled with emergencies, data migration, backup clean-up and end-user babysitting. Sometimes, you find yourself faced with engineers who have nothing to do. Naturally, you don’t want those brilliant minds idle — or else you’d have World of Warcraft parties breaking out in the department. So what can you do when slow times strike? Well, it’s simple. You tackle the tasks that you’re normally too busy to get to.

Jack Wallen, writing for TechRepublic Premium, presents 10 chores that will keep your department humming, even when there are no front-burner issues to deal with.

Featured text from the guide:

5. Clean up your code

Sometimes, when things are crazy, we don’t write the cleanest code. Or we may forget to comment it. We all know the benefits of clean code — easier debugging and rewriting and, in some cases, more efficient execution. We also know that, when code is written poorly, it can be a real pain to clean up — so slow times are well suited for taking on this sigh-inducing task.

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TIME SAVED: Crafting this content required eight hours of dedicated writing, editing and research. No World of Warcraft parties were involved in its creation.