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What I do is take every opportunity to work on small (ideally small enough that I can finish it at work) projects that make my day job (warehouse QA) a little easier.

For example: today was a slow day, so I figured I'd do audits in my down time. Normally I respond to detected errors as they arise, but when volume is low, there aren't enough detected errors to take up all my time. Audits, on the other hand, involve checking specific areas for errors.

I didn't want to do audits blindly, so I wrote a little JS script that let me take a week's worth of error logs and find the areas with the most errors.

I figured the company already had a tool to do this and I just didn't have access to it. After I was finished, I asked the QA manager and he said he didn't have a way to get that information either, so I sent it off to him and made his day job a little easier too.

Another example: we were using a third-party barcode generator to circumvent some issues with barcodes that weren't working right, but it generated the barcode server-side, so we had to wait for the POST request to submit and the page with the server-rendered bar code to load, which sometimes took a while. I figured that wasn't great for the people who had hourly quotas to meet (who have to find someone with a laptop whenever they encounter a barcode that isn't working right), so I wrote one in JS that does it all in the frontend and builds the barcode as you type.