Do you not have a bug tracker or ticketing system of some sort to manage these things coming your way?
Incredibly few people at my work get much more than dismissive small talk from just walking up or from sending me a message expecting me to re-prioritize everything else for their special pet problem.
My manager sets my priorities, any changes to that need to come from him. They can take it up with him if they don’t like it or disagree.
I don’t respond to IMs or emails not from my boss or from my own team except when I’ve hit a mental road block and need to think about something else to refresh.
And I don’t actually work on any of those requests until there’s a ticket in. If someone comes to me asking why my main job duty isn’t done, I’m sure as hell going to have a paper trail documenting who fucked up the timeline. No ticket, no work.
That also puts some weight on anyone else able to pick up tickets for your team to do it, so it’s not always falling to you because you’re not jaded enough to say no.
My previous job didn’t have a ticket tracker for my team. It was my first real job, so I didn’t realize how far we were straying from best practices. If I had some more experience, I would have pushed hard for ticket tracking. I was constantly disorganized, and my manager blamed me for not keeping track of everything. He was probably in his 50’s, he should have known better.
Hahaha I wish. There isn’t any real “management” to speak of where I’m at, and it’s a flat structure, meaning literally anyone can send me work and I’m just expected to do it. Right now I’m working the weekend to finish a task that someone else couldn’t do and it fell to me. There’s a ticketing system, but it’s only really half-used (of course, I myself turn these tasks into tickets, but that’s about it).
Trying to slowly change all this over time, because I love my job outside of this lack of management, but I also don’t hold any delusions about that.
Jesus fuck I would hate to work with you. At my job there’s a lot of teams working on a lot of projects with very tight deadlines, and if every request had to be routed through managers it would take 10x as long. When we ask people from other teams directly for help, “I’m sorry I’m too busy right now” is a perfectly acceptable response because we’ve all been there. We don’t need our managers to act like playground referees.
We’re all intelligent and capable workers and we get paid well to take initiative and solve things without running to mommy.
Do you not have a bug tracker or ticketing system of some sort to manage these things coming your way?
Incredibly few people at my work get much more than dismissive small talk from just walking up or from sending me a message expecting me to re-prioritize everything else for their special pet problem.
My manager sets my priorities, any changes to that need to come from him. They can take it up with him if they don’t like it or disagree.
I don’t respond to IMs or emails not from my boss or from my own team except when I’ve hit a mental road block and need to think about something else to refresh.
And I don’t actually work on any of those requests until there’s a ticket in. If someone comes to me asking why my main job duty isn’t done, I’m sure as hell going to have a paper trail documenting who fucked up the timeline. No ticket, no work.
That also puts some weight on anyone else able to pick up tickets for your team to do it, so it’s not always falling to you because you’re not jaded enough to say no.
My previous job didn’t have a ticket tracker for my team. It was my first real job, so I didn’t realize how far we were straying from best practices. If I had some more experience, I would have pushed hard for ticket tracking. I was constantly disorganized, and my manager blamed me for not keeping track of everything. He was probably in his 50’s, he should have known better.
Hahaha I wish. There isn’t any real “management” to speak of where I’m at, and it’s a flat structure, meaning literally anyone can send me work and I’m just expected to do it. Right now I’m working the weekend to finish a task that someone else couldn’t do and it fell to me. There’s a ticketing system, but it’s only really half-used (of course, I myself turn these tasks into tickets, but that’s about it).
Trying to slowly change all this over time, because I love my job outside of this lack of management, but I also don’t hold any delusions about that.
Jesus fuck I would hate to work with you. At my job there’s a lot of teams working on a lot of projects with very tight deadlines, and if every request had to be routed through managers it would take 10x as long. When we ask people from other teams directly for help, “I’m sorry I’m too busy right now” is a perfectly acceptable response because we’ve all been there. We don’t need our managers to act like playground referees.
We’re all intelligent and capable workers and we get paid well to take initiative and solve things without running to mommy.