What a week. Yes, I know it's only Tuesday.

[mousme]

 I am having kind of a tough week, work-wise. I did get to bed early yesterday, but I'm (not surprisingly) still feeling the effects of all of last week's poor sleep choices, and I think it's brought down my tolerance level for frustration. I have a Skype call with my parents tonight, and after that I am going to dive directly into bed again. The only way out is through, so I am just going to keep reasonable bedtimes, especially while I'm still feeling this drained.

In the meantime, without going into too much detail, I figure I should write down what's been bothering me about work.

1. I didn't get my weekly report for last week done yet. Normally I get them done on Friday afternoon, but we've had something of a "crisis" which has eaten up a lot of my time.
2. Said "crisis" is that we are being migrated from an old email program (Groupwise) to a new email program (Outlook) on one of our secure networks, and the IT people/migration team didn't take my unit into account because we are a tiny handful of people and from the outside we seem insignificant. Unfortunately we work very differently from the majority of the organization AND we are also a vital part of making sure the organization communicates with all other government branches. Cue clusterfuck.
3. My employee's pay woes continue. I mentioned them here before, I think, and while it looked like things were resolved right before Christmas and that she would be seeing back pay at the beginning of January, none of it materialized. In fact, in some instances we appear to have taken several steps backward. My Director and I got hold of the Director of National Compensation Services yesterday, and he has promised to take care of it personally, so I guess we'll see. I am incredibly frustrated on behalf of my employee, and she is understandably nearing the end of her rope. Her credit is suffering, her mother has been buying her groceries, it's a damned mess. The Director of National Compensation Services said we ought to hear back from him before the end of next week, and I intend to hold him to it.
4. My Staff Sergeant went on long-term leave after committing to a fairly big project for another unit, and now I am left with it even though I have no idea what I'm doing and it doesn't come under our purview, per se. I've spent quite a lot of energy trying to chase  down people who can actually help me with this thing.
5. All of the above has made me "fall behind" on other work that needs to get done, because I've been making an effort to leave work closer to on time than before. I'm still not leaving on time, but much closer to actual quitting time, and that's resulting in stuff not getting done. Part of this is poor time management on my part; it's never been my strong suit, and I have trouble evaluating how long some things will take, and I still procrastinate on tasks I'm not sure how to tackle.

In short, bleh. I'm hoping another night or two of good sleep will let me handle the work frustrations better and procrastinate less on the tasks that have felt too big or too complicated. 

Comments

[kiwano.melon.org]

My Staff Sergeant went on long-term leave after committing to a fairly big project for another unit, and now I am left with it even though I have no idea what I'm doing and it doesn't come under our purview, per se. I've spent quite a lot of energy trying to chase down people who can actually help me with this thing.

This sounds like a great opportunity to set and enforce some boundaries. You didn't make the commitment, you're not in the unit that it was made to, you don't have the skills/knowledge to meet the commitment, and you most certainly don't have the time to to act as though anything else I've said is untrue.

Making a commitment like this, with an impending long-term leave, and failing to either properly hand it off before said leave, or to inform the unit to which the commitment was made that it wouldn't be completed until after he returned from leave, is a failure in integrity. Unless you're the one in a position to discipline him for this lack of integrity upon his return, its consequences are not your problem (and even then, it may not be necessary to take responsibility beyond making a statement to the effect of "I'm sorry that my subordinate made commitments that he was unprepared to meet; rest assured that he will be appropriately disciplined for this lack of integrity when he returns from leave.")

[mousme]

Oh, indeed. By "help me with this thing" I meant more like "take it off my hands." I don't have the time to do it, even if I had the tools and expertise.

FWIW I don't think he planned on another long-term leave. He came back from a long-term stress leave and I think took on too much, too fast, and it set him back.

Either way, I'm not going to be handling this project beyond the effort it will take to hand it off to someone better suited to it.

[colestainedpage.livejournal.com]

That is A LOT of incredibly frustrating stuff happening all at once.

I'm intrigued by the email crisis you're experiencing. A few years ago we moved from Lotus Notes to Office 365 and I think our IT people went overboard taking things into account. But I'm sure your gov organization is quite a bit bigger than my little non-profit publishing company, and as such is susceptible to issues like what you're having. I hope they get things sorted soon so that your department is migrated.