Hey Morris, my boss has been piling more and more on to my desk recently. We’re short-staffed so I know I have to bear with it but I’m getting burnt out, and I don’t know how to tell my boss. He has a lot on his plate and I don’t want to be another reason for him to worry about.
-Exhausted
Dear Exhausted,
It’s nice that you don’t want to be another reason for your boss to worry, but the reality is you’re burnt out. Letting him know now so he that can adjust your workload while you’re still willing to help is better than staying silent until you decide to leave or have a nervous breakdown.
Saying ‘no’ to more work was hard for me, too. When I first started at Microsoft eons ago I felt that as a rookie I needed to do everything my boss asked. On the one hand, I gained a lot of experience quickly and got promoted. On the other hand, I was constantly stressed and had no work-life balance. We were launching a product and it was a ‘death march’ to the finish, so to some extent being over-extended was ok. But after the product launch we immediately went into another cycle, and the work pace never let up.
At first, I enjoyed my first window office, seniority and newfound responsibilities. But I became even more overloaded than before, and I didn’t tell my boss. He was having some personal issues at home and I didn’t want to add to his worries, or have him think I couldn’t handle the tasks he had given me. Then, about a week before a review, I got some bad news. The product schedule officially slipped because I had handed a spec in too late and it required more code to be (re)-written.
Head hung low, I had to tell my boss, who was upset that I didn’t ask him to adjust my workload so I could finish the spec on time. After he calmed down, I explained that I was being considerate of his personal situation at home and didn’t want to worry him.
And his response?
Basically, ‘it’s my f***ing job to help you manage your time by helping you to prioritize. When you don’t tell me that you’re overloaded, how the hell am I supposed to do my job, which is to help you prioritize?’
It was a tough and valuable lesson. When you’re capable, and say ‘yes’ all the time, it’s easy to give the impression that you have bandwidth and are a team player. Saying ‘no’ doesn’t negate your capability or the team player impressions, it just communicates that you don’t have the bandwidth to handle more work to at your normal level of quality. And that should be perfectly acceptable to any manager because it’s their job to help you manage your workload by prioritizing it and to make sure that the work you do is of the highest quality possible.
After learning this lesson, I began to say ‘no’ to some things. Years later, a senior manager told me that when I began to say ‘no’ was the moment that they realized I had grown up. To them, it meant I was focused on what was important — my main job, to the point where I had the courage to protect my bandwidth to make that job great. I demonstrated I knew how to prioritize what was important, and that was the golden ticket to my next promotion.
Have a conversation with your boss and let him know that he gave you too much work and you’d like his help to prioritize your workload. Together you two should decide what’s important, which I can assure you, won’t be everything.
Is there something else on your mind? Please send it to questions@heymorris.com and I’ll do my best to be helpful in a future post.
Hey Morris 