Spent 4 years saying yes to every project at my job in Austin, then a coworker quit and I saw her workload was half of mine | Career Advice - HW Forums
Spent 4 years saying yes to every project at my job in Austin, then a coworker quit and I saw her workload was half of mine
I kept thinking saying yes to everything would get me promoted, so I was pulling 55 hour weeks while my teammate left at 5 every day and still got the same raise I did last March. My boss pulled me aside after she quit and asked if I could 'absorb some of her tasks too' and I just sat there realizing nobody ever told me to do all this extra stuff. How do you actually pull back when you've already set the bar this high, do you just pick a day and start saying no?
I did the same thing for years and honestly my biggest skill at work became making myself look busy while drowning, so congrats to us both I guess. The hard part is that once you're the person who always says yes, people just stop asking and start assuming, which is what happened with your boss here. You don't have to pick one day and flip a switch, that usually backfires and makes you look like you stopped caring overnight. Start with the easy stuff, like when your boss asks you to take on her tasks, say you can take two of them but the rest have to go somewhere else or something has to come off your plate. Then let a few small things slip just a little past deadline so the bar lowers on its own, people adjust fast when they see you're human. Did your boss actually give you a choice on taking her work, or was it just sort of assumed?