Thank you for this opportunity to do more work. You know me, always looking for ways to give back to our team and spend more time staring at Microsoft Office products. Your request feels like the furthest thing from “work,” even though all I’ve been able to think about since opening your email is how I need to not go to bed if I’m going to get this done.
You really couldn’t have voluntold a better person, because there’s nothing that bothers me more than having a gap between meetings on my calendar, and your request has added another meeting where pesky free time used to exist. You know what they say: “Free time during conventional business hours is just a meeting waiting to be scheduled.” This gives me a great opportunity to remain in front of my computer screen after my last meeting wraps up at 7 PM.
Oh no, don’t worry, I don’t think your request for a full hour of prepared content and exercises on minimizing burnout is last-minute or unrealistic. The meeting isn’t until 4 PM tomorrow; that means you’ve given me over 1,500 minutes to get this done. Thank you!!!!!
That should also give me enough time to make the slides for our CFO that your boss asked me for an hour before that; call the virtual escape room vendor for the Christmas party that your boss’s boss directed me to plan; meet with every other person who reports to you to walk them through how to perform tasks they perform monthly and should therefore definitely already know how to do (But who am I to judge? I’m just here to help!); set up follow-up meetings with those same direct reports of yours to see if they have any questions the day after tomorrow; set up meetings with you, your boss, and your boss’s boss to see if there are any questions about the potential questions that our team has about their monthly deliverables; and complete the employee engagement survey you just posted in our team Slack.
Above all, I’m grateful to be part of the #FutureOfWork in our #HybridWorld, spending every waking moment looking interested on video calls (On camera! Wouldn’t have it any other way!) while also trying to keep up with tasks generated by prior video calls. I know you said there will be time for Q&A after my prepared remarks, and I can’t tell you how happy the thought of answering unscripted questions about my work-related stress makes me. Truly, I can’t tell you, because my mind went completely blank when I read that part of your email.
Okay, now that I’ve regained feeling in my brain, the possibility of being asked how to best word a time-off request, or how to best avoid work communications while taking time off, or how to say the word “no” in any way at any time, or how to come to terms with the realization that this is now my life and nothing will change unless I tell my boss/boss’s boss/boss’s boss’s boss to fuck off and go-ahead-try-my-burned-out-ass-and-see-what-happens-you-heartless-middle-management-half-fucking-wits is making me a touch anxious.
But no worries! I’ll get to work on this presentation, and if anyone tomorrow asks a question that triggers an existential crisis, I’ll just ask them to find time on my calendar for a quick follow-up discussion 🙂