Overwhelmed? Just Say 'No.'
theatlantic.com
theatlantic.com
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.
I'm not saying there aren't assholes out there, but I would chalk your experience up to mostly misunderstandings rather than malice.
When speaking of that with people the very large portion of them (like 90%) were like "keep it low", "that's how jobs are", etc. My own father mocked me when I spoke about fighting for my rights in my current company. One people encouraged me but added that they wouldn't have the courage to do it in my situation. It's astonishing how most people are carpets, ready to by walked on. Slaves who don't even entertain the thought of rising their voices.
Which brings me to the middle managers and why I think GP is right: most people just bend their head and accept to do whatever is thrown at them, of course surprised pikachu face happens when someone they no. Since managers manage slaves and slaves can't say no, mechanically it raises the question of the status of someone who is confident enough to stand for himself.
It also reminds me of this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qD6uMxnYE9s
After losing a birth mother our family is going through some shit... this quote of yours captures well how the eventual-lawyer-brother pitted other brothers against one-another, and joining in to not be the targeted brother.
I'm worried about neither job loss nor "whining," I just want to understand better.
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.
Pretty sure the business strategy at my old job was to keep giving more work until the person quit or figured out a way to handle it. If you said no, you weren't going to be the one progressing.
I stayed to my breaking point, didn't over stay, but so glad I left.
I like difficult tasks, completing difficult tasks is really fulfilling to me. I just don't like impossible situations.
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.
I just tell people when it can be done without me shuffling my priorities around (or whatever shuffling makes sense in my head and doesn’t stress me out). Perhaps I’m lucky, but 95% of the time the person asking doesn’t care. People are really keen to “get things taken care of” but “I spoke to this person and then said they could get it by next Tuesday” often ticks that box just fine.
In that last 5% when someone doesn’t like the timeline I’ve provided for them, I just let them know what’s ahead of them in my work queue. 95% of the time after that they realize that they are talking to the wrong person if they want to cut in line. That last 5% of the 5% when someone really wants to press the issue, I just suggest we get a manager to help decide what the priorities should be.
Your mileage may vary though, I’ve been pretty fortunate to work at places that expect a lot but also don’t expect the impossible. I’ve definitely gotten the “can’t we find some way to get it done by X” I have taken to just responding “not unless you’d like me to work outside of our working hours.” It sorta flips the tables, I’m not saying “no” but I’m making very explicit the shitty thing they want me to do and I’m requiring them to take the affirmative action of saying “yes, I want you to work outside of working hours.”
I wouldn’t stay somewhere where that happened frequently, but being able to say that is a luxury many people don’t have. In any case, maybe you will find some success with these strategies, I’ve found them to be pretty effective and they seemed to be received much better than just saying “no” and it has the nice side effect of you looking reasonable and organized.
(saying no doesnt mean you say it out loud. there are a thousand ways to say no)
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.
I think your reply shows perfectly well that guarding your boundaries is not exactly laziness.
- set medium/low expectation. To that effect don't work more than 5-6 hours out of your 6-7 hours day. This way you'll always have capacity to work more dor a rush and may be priced for that; conversely if you're always working at fill capacity and for some reason you can't deliver be you'll be criticized for it and your previous hard work will go unnoticed. Of course deliver acceptable output, preferably just above the bare minimum to keep the job.
- learn to shift blame. The CI is slow, code is crap, etc. Sugar-coat it with ideas for improvements. Those will realistically never happen but you'll pass as a bit more positive while the blame can be shift to the people making the decision not to improve things.
- know the laws applicable to you, and to businesses. Whoever has knowledge has an edge, and the HR department sure know a lot. Check primary and secondary sources. It's not because someone or the company say something that it's true, and some threat are simply inapplicables and bet on worker's lack of knowledge.
What kind of struggle?
In this example, you bought that home because you wanted to live in it, not for generating income. Why would you even care about some abstract worth that other people are randomly assigning to it?
All I have to say about this is that just saying "no" is certainly _a_ strategy, but a better one is to clearly and precisely outline the man hours you expect to need for a certain task. "Sure I can do this, it's going to cost X weeks of my time at the opportunity cost of working on Y and Z" (don't forget to add Scotty's hedge). Doing this advertises to your management that you are competently managing your time, and can think clearly about how to prioritize things for the business.
Give it a try some time. It’s a lot of fun. You can’t make a career out of saying no. But you can probably stay at the same place doing the same work for 10 years. If that’s your thing.
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.
- 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).