My childhood friends started saying that anyone working after noon on Friday is disorganized and I think it's beautiful.
It don't matter how organized I am, my boss sees I'm done by noon on a friday he'll give me more service calls, shop time or some other job to do.
Wow, Sounds like you really need to work on your time management skills.
That’s where you’re going wrong, you still need to pretend you’re doing work
Just don't say you're done with your work.
That only works until the last call I did calls to pay their bill and now the office knows I'm done my work. I usually just suck it up and take more work, I'd hoestly rather that than twiddle my thumbs for a few hours.
Oh, I see. My work only knows I'm done by when I move my tickets to complete on Jira, so I just leave them as in progress until my due date. I work from home, so I just watch TV or play video games while sitting near my work laptop to respond to emails or chat messages in the meantime.
Living the dream!
That's why you develop the talent of looking busy while not doing shit.
Must be nice to not have billable hours to worry about…
It is. You should try to move to a career where you sell the results of your labor, not the time it takes to achieve them. Easier said than done, I know. Good luck!
I already finished all my work for the sprint that ends on Tuesday. It's Thursday at noon currently.
How about also, "Wow, seems like you need to work on your resource planning skills," when a manager tries to demand unpaid overtime?
I think you might just straight say "management skills" because that's bare minimum part of their fucking job to organize a schedule well enough so they don't have to have people running into overtime to get the job done. That is time management, too, because you're supposed to know how long it takes each employee to do shit, and you should be fucking organizing based on that.
I'm so fucking sick of skeleton crews. I'm pushing 50 and the last 25 fucking years has been nothing but skeleton crews where if one person calls out sick everything falls apart. Sorry, that's inefficient as hell. If one person calling out wrecks everything, then that means you're doing it fucking wrong and maybe you need one or two more people to help cover the gaps. I'm sure it makes them beaucoup bucks in the short term, but the profits from ruining your relationship with your customer base won't last. Eventually customers do get sick of being treated like shit. (Corporations are banking on all of them similarly treating you like shit so you won't have any real options that are better.)
skeleton crews
I'm not a manager, but if I had a business critical three person job and some busywork, I'd schedule four people minimum. Probably five if the busywork is important at the time.
I'd straight up tell a boss that asked for unpaid overtime that their failure to allocate resources is money out of my pocket if and only if you want to hear from the DoL.
Unfortunately, many jobs that do this are salaried exempt.
Now, whether they are miss categorized is a different story. That's why my wife's old workplace is going to get some attention from the IRS and DOL when she finishes her month's notice.
My coworkers give me shit for not working late all the time. Like, I work late when I absolutely have to or get permission to make up missed time. I refuse to stay just because lol.
At my last job, I would clock-watch like a kid in school and bolt out of there when it got to be 5. No fucking way was I staying there any longer than I had to.
Your coworkers shame you for not donating your time to the company?
Seems pretty fucked up. sounds like yall need a union rep.
I had someone boast that they had all their vacation days at the end of the year because they were so “devoted”. I just said it seems they have bad time management since this time off was included in schedules.
For me, it's very much cyclical: when there is a project going, there are so many people counting on you that pretty much every minute counts, and the cost of mistakes is always high. It's during these times that time management skill is critical and you need people on the team who's job is to manage everybody's time and make sure things gets done, but even with that, the long hours are unavoidable. I don't think it's something to brag about, it's the nature of the job.
But when there is no project going, it feels like there is really not much to do all day, sometimes even the task of finding things to do is a struggle, so you do whatever you want until the next project starts.
Here's my view as an executive, if my folks regularly add hours to their day/week to get their job done they're not good at their job. If they're good at their job they know how to prioritize and they also know how to optimize and automate constantly so they can do more with less. They also do their form of zero base reporting or zero base budgeting constantly to get rid of what was once important that no longer is.
To be fair in senior leadership a 40 hour week probably isn't going to happen but you should swing between 55 hours and 30 hours depending on the week and average it to the mid to high 40s.
I suspect this isn't going to be a popular post, and I accept your down votes but would also like to hear your contrary view along with it if you don't mind.
I'd say there's also something to be said about an overbearing workload. If everyone is constantly struggling to get things done in time then more staff could be needed. But yeah, if it's the same ones over and over and only them, then investigating why makes sense.
If the majority of the people the majority of the time have the same result then it's the system not the people.
So yeah it could be a systemic issue, it's my job to prevent or correct that.
Look to the managers. They often suck, and shit rolls downhill.
Agreed! Luckily they're fairly easy to replace as long as you don't build systems that won't allow them to fail.
A decade or more before COVID my favorite tool was to let everyone work from home. Those that sucked at their job wouldn't get anything done. HR would just ask we bring them all in and I'd refuse. If they can't be trusted to work without supervision they can't be trusted to work with it.
Now keep in mind we have to be reasonable people and not driving our people beyond reasonableness.
if my folks regularly add hours to their day/week to get their job done they're not good at their job
Or they have too much work
I know lots of senior management and companies that only do a 40 hour work week. if you are doing 55 there is too much work for the staff employed.
My time management is great. I do my job and the job of the person underneath me, because we can't find anyone worth a damn.
Make sure you highlight this in your one on one discussions with your manager and get compensated. You’re doing two jobs- your employer should not be taking advantage of you. Get paid my friend.
Nawh he's the problem, complain? Attitude problem. We'll find a new guy for half the salary and not tell him what he's getting into.
I always wondered how bragging about how long you worked was considered by some as a good thing. The "higher ups" must have used some fancy tricks to get people to think that way. It never worked on me though :)
I always wondered how bragging about how long you worked was considered by some as a good thing.
Somebody invented "Employee of the Month" and our competitive habits took over.
Management was handing out bullshit busywork recently, and some people were complaining. Then some guy was like "they pay my salary, so I do whatever they want!"
What kind of bullshit wage slave mentality is that? I am the vendor in this scenario, my employer is paying for the privilege of using my services. There can be terms and conditions from both parties of that deal, and if they're incompatible the deal is off.
Modern day life is a competition, people always want to "1 up" the previous person. This is prevalent in society, don't overthink it
My CW gets to work at 630 am despite having absolutely no reason to do so as the role she does doesn't start until 8 and she's just there to check people in, and stays late to sanitize her desk every day. I wander in at 829 and clock out at 423. Fuck it. I'm in a union for a reason.
What about people that complain about how long they work (yeah, I do have some suboptimal time management skills, and I'm a little sensitive about it)?
Better yet, offer to help them with their time management. That way, it's a positive and friendly offer, not an overt criticism. And it jams in a little more condescension.
