David mentions this phenomenon briefly in part 3 of the book: now that I'm organised, have a full overview, and never drop the ball, I'm frustrated with others who don't prioritise properly and forget things.
I don't really hate everybody, but my boss has been annoying the beans out of me lately. We share IT support and maintenance tasks where I work, but he has the final say in what gets worked on and when. His decisions are all knee-jerk, his office space is full of stacks of paper and scraps of notes, and his email inbox has over 5000 mails in it - as was mine before I did the big collection and processing bonanza back in december (though I had only a 2 foot high stack in my paper inbox, and *only* 2500 mails in my email inbox). To make matters worse, he's a volunteer fireman on the side (and anyone who knows or is related to a firefighter knows, they looove putting out fires). What I'm getting at is that the prioritising of work to be done in our little IT department is determined by the height of the flames, not by preemptive planning.
I'm sick of it. This past week has been hard, and I have been on the verge of losing it several times. I had been given so many relatively unimportant and impromptu tasks to do (while he was working on more of the same) that by thursday I had to force him to sit still for fifteen minutes so I could show him a sampling of my projects list. I chose about 10 things that were only days away from being overdue, and things that were about to explode. Before we had even gotten through 3 of them (and after he'd yelled at me for wasting time trying to prioritise our departments tasks - that's his job) his phone rang. The file server was full. Again. The sad irony is that point 6 on my list was "Fix file server disk space problems", which he had forgotten about, and for which I had a next action that I could never complete, because he was constantly giving me "important" tasks that had to be done right away. He wasted half an hour patching it with gum and duct tape (i.e. it's gonna fill up again soon), and by the time he finished with that I had to leave for an appointment.
He did say that we need a shared overview of all the projects in the department, and a support ticketting system, but how am I supposed to share such a system with an oaf who can't even manage his own work?
Oh that felt good to vent :shock: I feel really stuck here - I like my job a lot, but boss never sits still long enough to have any kind of discussion, and I feel that if I were to talk to anybody else at the office about this that I'd either be making him look bad, or going over his head.
Has anyone else had similar experiences? How to cope?!
I don't really hate everybody, but my boss has been annoying the beans out of me lately. We share IT support and maintenance tasks where I work, but he has the final say in what gets worked on and when. His decisions are all knee-jerk, his office space is full of stacks of paper and scraps of notes, and his email inbox has over 5000 mails in it - as was mine before I did the big collection and processing bonanza back in december (though I had only a 2 foot high stack in my paper inbox, and *only* 2500 mails in my email inbox). To make matters worse, he's a volunteer fireman on the side (and anyone who knows or is related to a firefighter knows, they looove putting out fires). What I'm getting at is that the prioritising of work to be done in our little IT department is determined by the height of the flames, not by preemptive planning.
I'm sick of it. This past week has been hard, and I have been on the verge of losing it several times. I had been given so many relatively unimportant and impromptu tasks to do (while he was working on more of the same) that by thursday I had to force him to sit still for fifteen minutes so I could show him a sampling of my projects list. I chose about 10 things that were only days away from being overdue, and things that were about to explode. Before we had even gotten through 3 of them (and after he'd yelled at me for wasting time trying to prioritise our departments tasks - that's his job) his phone rang. The file server was full. Again. The sad irony is that point 6 on my list was "Fix file server disk space problems", which he had forgotten about, and for which I had a next action that I could never complete, because he was constantly giving me "important" tasks that had to be done right away. He wasted half an hour patching it with gum and duct tape (i.e. it's gonna fill up again soon), and by the time he finished with that I had to leave for an appointment.
He did say that we need a shared overview of all the projects in the department, and a support ticketting system, but how am I supposed to share such a system with an oaf who can't even manage his own work?
Oh that felt good to vent :shock: I feel really stuck here - I like my job a lot, but boss never sits still long enough to have any kind of discussion, and I feel that if I were to talk to anybody else at the office about this that I'd either be making him look bad, or going over his head.
Has anyone else had similar experiences? How to cope?!
