[HN Gopher] Overwhelmed? Just Say 'No.'
___________________________________________________________________
Overwhelmed? Just Say 'No.'
Author : fortran77
Score : 31 points
Date : 2024-02-29 17:38 UTC (5 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.theatlantic.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.theatlantic.com)
| mahidhar wrote:
| https://archive.is/X8ih6
| t1c wrote:
| Homeless? Just buy a house.
| mitthrowaway2 wrote:
| Indeed. I'm feeling a bit overwhelmed right now with tasks
| assigned to me by the government, but I don't think I can say
| "no" to filing taxes and accounting paperwork, even when they
| make it continuously more work to do so. So now I'm off to the
| post office to have them verify my identity as part of a
| mandatory process to access their online tax-payment system.
| r00fus wrote:
| You can outsource this, you know.
| mitthrowaway2 wrote:
| I'm not convinced that doing so requires any less work, and
| I especially don't think it would bypass identity
| verification procedures. At least I hope that it cannot.
| atum47 wrote:
| I was thinking the same thing. How many times can I say no to a
| difficult task before they let me go?
| jjav wrote:
| I used to never say no and I worked 18 hour days. Not great.
|
| I started to say no but that does piss people off. Not so
| great either.
|
| Now, unless it's completely ridiculous request, I never say
| no.
|
| I say something like "Happy to help! Sounds like this might
| take about an hour, I can pencil in that time for this
| project next week Thursday afternoon, looking forward to it!"
|
| If they insist it's for tomorrow I'll include in the
| discussion whoever needed me today and let them know there is
| a higher priority request. Let them fight it out. Turns out
| people are quick to ask for my time ASAP, but if they learn
| they have to confront someone else to negotiate for it, those
| requests die down. Or if it truly was so urgent, no problem,
| we'll rearrange.
| throwway120385 wrote:
| I get a lot of mileage out of "I'm happy to help but first
| I need to let my manager know that you've asked me to do
| this." Usually the request dies about 15 minutes after.
| cchi_co wrote:
| It's so hard to say 'no' for me. Fear of negative consequences
| due to the way I was raised... And desire to please everyone
| around me also because of the way I was raised
| Loughla wrote:
| Step 1 is identifying the problem, step 2 is trying to fix it.
|
| I was an absolute door mat style of people pleaser. I just
| started saying no to people about things that were low-risk,
| and seeing what happened. I still get massive anxiety from it,
| but I can say no like a champion now. Probably a little too
| often, if I'm honest.
|
| I did not seek out therapy, but probably should've.
|
| If you're looking for advice - spend some time on this. My
| experience is that people who have negative personality traits,
| and try to blame the way they were raised, are not taken
| serious as adults in the working world.
|
| If you're not looking for advice - then just tell me to fuck
| right off back to where I came from. No problem, either way.
| McDyver wrote:
| There's a book that addresses that, and might be helpful to
| you: "When I Say No, I Feel Guilty" - Manuel J. Smith
| philip1209 wrote:
| Cal Newport talks about a similar concept - that work is assigned
| through a _push_ system rather than a _pull_ system. When workers
| are completely overwhelmed, they deny push requests - like "can
| you have this done by tomorrow". But, Cal hypothesizes that we
| set our "completely overwhelmed" threshold too high - resulting
| in us accepting pushes of additional work. He recommends lowering
| that threshold further (and, ideally, switching to pull-based
| work systems).
| buffet_overflow wrote:
| The analogy I used back when I managed a team was that our
| workload was like a funnel. You need some amount of overhead to
| balance the pressure and keep things flowing. If you put too
| much in the funnel, things backup and spill. It's faster to
| leave that little gap than it is to try to use the absolute
| maximum volume.
| angarg12 wrote:
| Sadly I see people struggling with overwork, afraid to push back
| way too often. What I learnt from my personal experience is this:
| when you push back, people respect you more, not less.
|
| I started my career in a small shop reporting to a toxic and
| abusive manager. Due to a combination of factors (my own
| upbringing, being a naive new grad, a bad economy) I didn't know
| how to handle the situation so I just took it silently. Those
| were some of the lowest points in my life. When I finally left, I
| decided I wouldn't allow myself to fall in the same situation
| again.
|
| Then I realized something amazing. Contrary to my fears, when I
| pushed back against unreasonable requests, for the most part
| people respected me more rather than less. Of course there is
| always people who retaliate, and the secret is you want to be far
| away from those people.
|
| This is my hypothesis of what is happening: most abusive managers
| are low confidence cowards which use their formal authority to
| bully others. Because they are cowards, if you stand up to them,
| most often they will be afraid of losing face, and will choose to
| bully someone weaker instead.
|
| Of course it isn't easy to start doing this out of the blue. Once
| you trained your manager to assume that you'll work 12 hour days
| and always say yes, it's very hard to make them change their
| mind, and you'll face retaliation. If you are in such a
| situation, I don't have great advice, other than you should look
| for another place to work, and start asserting yourself, even if
| in small ways at first.
|
| Unfortunately I know many people will ignore my advice. They'll
| say I'm being idealistic, or that it worked only for me, or that
| they can't afford to lose their job. But I hope that at least
| some people will follow this advice and we'll give less food to
| the toxic managers of the world.
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| Amen. Establish your boundaries and enforce them hard. Be
| intentional about building a foundation to derisk if enforcing
| your boundaries causes a negative event.
| PH95VuimJjqBqy wrote:
| I think a more fair interpretation is the managers don't fully
| realize just how busy you are and are following the path of
| least resistance. When you're more clear in your communication,
| it helps them understand.
|
| I'm not saying there aren't assholes out there, but I would
| chalk your experience up to mostly misunderstandings rather
| than malice.
| 331c8c71 wrote:
| How do I say no to myself? Or at least how can I be realistic
| with myself so that I can guard enough time/energy to do what I
| actually say to myself I will do?
|
| One manifestation of that problem is a quickly growing list of
| "must read" or "interesting" papers. They are all filed nicely
| but I managed to read only a few so far.
| rufius wrote:
| Two options from my own experience:
|
| - Allocate a regular time to read the papers/articles. Accept
| that the list may forever grow. Bonus points if you tag the
| content going in so that you can prioritize a tag/topic to make
| progress in a space you like.
|
| - Expire out old content you aren't going to get to. I triage
| my list periodically, sorted by oldest. If I don't remember
| adding it or don't feel interested based on a skim of title and
| intro, it gets deleted.
|
| I pulled these from how I treat feature/bug backlogs at work.
| If it's older than 90 days since any activity and a feature -
| delete. If it's a bug, it gets archived (in case of repro steps
| needed).
| mc32 wrote:
| Aha, the Nancy Reagan approach to complex problems reduced to a
| simple word that makes total sense in a rational and cooperative
| world --just not in the real world.
| mawadev wrote:
| Overwhelmed? Just stop paying your bills.
| nisa wrote:
| One thing I realized after some rather ugly burn out a few years
| ago is that I mostly created my misery myself - there were
| demands and questions if I can take on some work but no
| psychopath managers, no deadlines that couldn't be moved.
|
| I created most of the pressure myself - my biggest sin was
| working more hours than being paid because I wanted the project
| to succeed. It was never appreciated and only lead to be being
| angrily called on Sunday if something was broken - something my
| lazier 9 to 5 colleagues never experienced.
|
| So I'd say instead of practicing no, first practice setting
| boundaries and practice organizing yourself.
|
| Additionally a perverted mechanism came into play because I cared
| and wanted to improve the product at the time - the others kind
| of said: do if you like but that came without any real support
| and it lead to me being kind of laughed at as a hot air talker
| just because I was the only one that wanted to improve things.
|
| Looking back I should have quit way earlier and of all things I
| shouldn't work overtime for free.
|
| Having to say no could have been avoided if I had a good schedule
| that I could have used to prioritize the orders and giving the
| person making the demands an overview of my workload.
|
| Watch out if there is some unhealthy inertia in your organization
| and especially be careful doing important silent work. It won't
| be thanked.
|
| Either quit and look elsewhere or watch out that your workload is
| fair and similar to your colleagues even if that means to not
| solve that interesting problem because it's not your official
| job.
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2024-02-29 23:01 UTC)