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Dear Liz,
I’m in a jam at work and I have no idea how to get out of it. I like my job in general but the hours are killing me. It’s my first salaried job. Just keeping up with my regular work takes me more than eight hours a day and then my boss gives me special projects on top of it. I get to work at seven-thirty a.m. and I never leave before 6:30 or 6:45 at night.
To make it worse, my boss doesn’t appreciate the extra time I spend in the office. She is out the door every day at five or five-fifteen. She shakes her head at me and says “You need help with your time management! When Linda was in your job, she got everything done by five.” I never met Linda because she left the state when she quit this job, but I don’t know she got everything done in eight hours. It’s just not that kind of job.
My CEO works late and he has commented to me a few times “I really appreciate your dedication, Rosalind” but that’s as far as it has ever gone. I feel like I’m in a bind because I have to work the killer hours to keep up with my work, but it isn’t getting me anywhere. In a way my long hours devalue me to my own boss. Help! What should I do?
Thanks,
Rosalind
Dear Rosalind,
Yours is a very frustrating and common problem. Salaried work is never done. You could stay at the office all night every night and work every day without stopping, and still never catch up.
That’s the nature of white-collar work. It isn’t ever finished!
Mother Nature, who gives us all the best lessons, has a lesson for you now. The lesson is called ”Setting Boundaries.”
Your boss has wedged you into a corner by requiring you to work late every day to get your work done but also demeaning you for all those extra hours. She doesn’t value them — so now is a great time to stop donating them!
Your job this weekend is to get a journal and a sturdy planner. In the journal, write about your job and focus on the time-consuming or difficult parts. Write about the waves of fear, trust and anxiety that swell and crash around you during the day at work.
Which projects, activities and tasks are the most challenging or the most stressful for you? Focus on those activities and plan to make them easier every time you perform them. Think about the organization of your desk and your schedule during the day.
Think like a project manager and ask yourself “How could I organize this role and this work to get the most important things done every day, without staying late to do it?”
Getting altitude on your own job is step number one in getting control of your life. Gradually over the next eight weeks, you are going to back off on the crazy hours and begin leaving work earlier and earlier. How will you do that and still keep up? You’ll do it by planning your day, every day, and planning your week.
When your boss gives you a project that will throw off other priorities, tell her so. “I got your email about the membership database upgrade and I wanted to check in with you to see whether you’d like me to work on that this Friday, or do it now and delay the delivery of the sales-by-region report.”
Put your workload problem on your boss’s shoulders where it belongs.
You will make yourself sick trying to please everyone around you. They hired you and they keep you there so they must appreciate something about you, whether your boss can verbalize it or not. Now is the perfect time for you to find your voice and set boundaries around your personal time.
As you back off on your working hours you will undoubtedly feel some strong emotions — fear that you might fall behind (and you almost certainly fall behind on the superhuman and unrealistic workload you’ve trained your boss to expect) and general nervousness about taking a new step.
Pay attention to and explore those feelings. Write about them in your journal. Keep breathing, and keep in mind that this kind of personal development is exactly what will power you through your incredible career.
Use your planner to begin planning every day on paper. Do it each night for the coming work day, or do it over coffee before you head to work. Run your desk the way a CEO runs his or her business — thoughtfully and with an eye on the horizon. You are not your manager’s beast of burden. You are a sharp and capable person who runs a Rosalind-shaped piece of your company’s business.
You are in charge of your work. Do a good day’s work every day and learn to tell your boss “I can take on this new project, absolutely — let’s look at my project plan and see which other projects can shift to make room for it.”
All the best to you,
Liz
Liz Ryan is the CEO and founder of Human Workplace. Follow her on Twitter and read the rest of her Forbes.com columns here.
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