They're referring to jobs where you have overarching goals and deliverables but aren't logging actions to the event, or to the hour.
I've had jobs like yours and steady, dependable, maintainable pace is the way to get through the week. Don't over promise, don't look available for random new tasks.
At my current gig I have tasks issued at the 2 week level, and aside from very rare requests for assistance or discussion, I'm left to my to-do list, and my predetermined commitments. If I consistently meet my commitments, and show up for scheduled meetings, no one gives a shit when I actually work. It's great but requires the right environment.
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 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.)
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.
Literally every order at my last job bottlenecked through me. That meant that I got shit every time I dared to take time off because it meant one of the salespeople had to do my job and they didn't even know how to do it well because our processes kept changing and only I was keeping up. I was paid dick despite that too. So glad to be away from that fucking job.
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.
Soon I'm going to be part of our safety management team, I respect this type of attitude. I don't want all of our employees being exhausted all day, that's dangerous. Go home, get rest, relax, come back 100% tomorrow. Any other attitude is unsustainable and irresponsible. I do appreciate the need to SOMETIMES work overtime. I'd really like to understand the positive feedback loop that's involved with excessive overtime but that's not my specific field of study.
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.
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.
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.
It's a swing, see, 30 - 55. In 2023 I averaged 46 hours a week with a low of 30 hours and a high of 57 hours. That's excluding the 5 partial weeks due to PTO and the full weeks off due to PTO and holiday weeks. I feel this for me is a healthy amount.
Mostly irregularity of what needs to happen. Some weeks everything you can imagine needs to happen now, other weeks not much needs to happen. I've learned not to shove my slow weeks with irrelevant busy work so I can ebb and flow with the work.
Last week with this SaaS implementation I was so busy I couldn't see straight. Right now I'm chilling on Lemmy and thinking about what other famous movie scenes I can enhance with Muppets lol.
Free advice: Don't do unpayed overtime and it will regulate itself. I work 36h/week and if there was too much work planned for me in a 2 week sprint I use the overtime to get a free Friday now and then.
Everything above 40h/week is unhealthy, at least for me, it is! In the near future I will ask for 32h/week; had that in a previous job and it was fantastic.
I sort of do that and have most of my career with my people. If I'm aware they've put in a bunch of hours I'll ask them to take time off on me. I'm sure I'm not always aware and I know it's against company policy but I've never been busted for it. But I don't make it an official policy just to stay on the safe side of company policy. I'm sure if someone found out and complained I'd not be able to do it anymore.
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.
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.
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 never thought about this before, but if I worked somewhere and they gave me an 'employee of the month' award, it would piss me off because it would make me feel like I was being a kissass somehow.
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.
Ah I have the attitude of “you’re free to pay me engineer money to do this, but I’m leaving at 4 whether I was productive or doing weird bullshit you decided on.“
I think people believe it is a sign you are striving to excel or that you care about the work you are doing.
In my case I think I talk about how much overtime I work because I got insecurities about my productivity drilled into me as a child with undiagnosed ADHD. Constantly being told you don't work hard enough regardless of the effort you put in will give you some weird hangups. I think subconsciously its about needing external validation that the time you put in was adequate, or insecurity around 'work ethic'
I can relate to that. I’m extremely glad I broke that habit. They told me when they needed me. I did what needed to be done within reasonable expectations. My failure past that point is on workload
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.
Do you brag about your long hours, or do you complain about the lack of predictability from management? Only the former matches the statement in the quote.
Some take my bitching and moaning that I was up all night working on ____ because the project is a complete mess and they wanted it today as "bragging".
Its performance review time, i hate myself and rent is expensive.
Ok yeah maybe but can we all stop writing our witty tweets in the same format? "normalize [abnormal thing]" is not only getting old, it probably is not effective at all
That's quite a claim! I'm interested to know more about your time management strategies. Do you have any specific techniques or tools that you find particularly effective? If you're looking for workers in Australia, I'd be happy to help.
What is this anti worker propaganda on .ml? Your fellow worker is brainwashed by the capitalist state and instead of seeking to build solidarity with them you mock them? How about sympathizing with their excessive workload and likely lacking compensation and eventually introducing that a different system would not require that from them?
Also, it is a time management issue, on a cultural level. Try getting Germans to stay past their shift they'll tell you to get better at managing. Not their department, not their problem.
Thinking "fixing this requires a socialist revolution" honestly is part of the problem: Organise to fix the issue, there, workers will see that issues can be fixed, fix more that comes up, and they'll both be emboldened and educated about their strength. Foreplay before sex.
Is the slave comment supposed to imply that I might be working more than I should? I'm literally saying it's a bad thing that it happens but we should be sympathetic to people who don't yet realize that and show them that they are being exploited. I don't see how this is funny, as there is no punchline or set up or anything. I don't think everyone needs to agree about comedy but I was sharing my opinion on this sentiment.