Minimum Effort
Minimum Effort: Office Sim
Slacking Off at Work Game for iPhone
Most games about slacking off give you a boss with a fixed patrol and a hiding place. This one gives you a price list. Every shortcut costs heat, heat decides how long you get to react, and the reaction window is measured in tenths of a second.
Free. iOS 17.0 or later.
The mechanic
Two seconds, and less when you are hot
Heat is not a suspicion meter. It is how interesting you look right now to a man walking past your desk. It rises while you are away from the desk doing something you should not be, and it falls slowly on its own and much faster while you sit there visibly working.
When the boss passes in the middle of an act, the game hands you a window to hit Look Busy. That window runs from 2.6 seconds when you are cool down to 1.2 seconds when you are not, and the size of it is decided before you see it. There is a perk called the alt-tab reflex that adds six tenths of a second back, and by the time you have earned it you will know exactly what six tenths are worth.
Saving it does not clear it. He noticed something, and a share of the heat stays on the record whether or not he could name what he saw.
The price list
What every shortcut actually costs
These are the moves that exist in every office in the game, with the numbers the simulation runs on. Minutes are minutes of the 480 you have. Heat is what the act adds while you do it. The last column is what it costs you if he catches you at it.
| Act | Minutes | Heat | If caught |
|---|---|---|---|
| Watch the clock | 5 | 1 | 1 |
| Bathroom break | 10 | 4 | 1 |
| Coffee run | 15 | 5 | 2 |
| Scroll your phone | 15 | 9 | 7 |
| Walk the floor holding a piece of paper | 20 | 2 | 2 |
| Read the news at your desk | 20 | 7 | 5 |
| Do some online shopping | 25 | 10 | 8 |
| Stand at the water cooler | 25 | 6 | 3 |
| A suspiciously long bathroom break | 30 | 12 | 4 |
| Disappear into the stairwell | 40 | 10 | 5 |
| Take a very long lunch | 75 | 16 | 6 |
| Claim your internet is down | 120 | 30 | 22 |
The best move on the board
Walking the floor at pace holding a piece of paper. Twenty minutes gone, two points of heat, and it reads as work to anyone who sees it. Nothing else on the list is that cheap, which is exactly the joke.
The one that is a claim, not a break
Claiming your internet is down buys two hours and only pays out if you let it run to the end. Announce an outage and then answer a message halfway through and it was never an outage. It also fires once per day.
Why pure slacking loses
Theatre cools you down. That is the whole strategy
Fake typing, staring at the screen thoughtfully, sending a pointless status email, reorganising a folder nobody opens. Every one of those is performed at the desk in full view, so every one of them lowers heat while producing the appearance of output.
What theatre never does is deliver. When the boss checks the deliverables at 17:00, perceived work can cover at most 40 percent of a shortfall, and only 35 percent of each unit counts toward that. The rest of the gap is still a gap and it costs reputation. So the strongest play is not slacking, and it is not working. It is alternating.
| Act | Minutes | Perceived work | Heat |
|---|---|---|---|
| Send a pointless status email | 10 | 8 | -2 |
| Schedule an unnecessary meeting | 10 | 7 | -1 |
| Type very fast at nothing | 15 | 5 | -6 |
| Stare at the screen thoughtfully | 20 | 3 | -4 |
| Reorganise a folder nobody opens | 30 | 10 | -5 |
The tax on habits
The fourth bathroom break is not the first bathroom break
Repeat the same act inside one day and its heat is multiplied, once per repeat. Two coffees is a person. Five coffees is a pattern, and a pattern is the thing the file is actually built out of.
The excuses work the same way, only slower. There are twelve, each clears a share of the heat you are carrying, and each one spends a little of its own credibility every time you tell it. One night restores a quarter of what a telling cost, so an excuse you leaned on twice this week is still thin on Friday. Below a certain credibility the game stops offering it at all, which is how the printer again, third time today quietly disappears from your hand.
Three of them are locked behind rank, because a junior claiming to have been upstairs with the board is not an excuse, it is a second offence.
| Excuse | Clears | Costs itself | Available |
|---|---|---|---|
| I was in the bathroom. | 30% | 0.12 | From day one |
| The printer again. Third time today. | 35% | 0.14 | From day one |
| I had to sign for something downstairs. | 40% | 0.22 | From day one |
| IT had my machine. | 45% | 0.20 | From day one |
| I was on a call. Client. Long one. | 50% | 0.18 | From day one |
| Migraine. I stepped out for ten minutes. | 55% | 0.28 | From day one |
| It was a funeral. I did mention it. | 75% | 0.45 | From day one |
| I was upstairs. With the board. | 70% | 0.20 | Third rung and above |
| I genuinely cannot tell you what that was. | 80% | 0.25 | Fourth rung and above |
Free, 7 MB, and the first day starts at 09:00.
More about the game