September 13, 2004 :: Coping in the Workplace: Scarcity

In this second installment of the Coping in the Workplace series, we'll talk about how to build on the skills from the previous lesson. There, you learned how to throttle your productivity to maintain your sanity and to keep yourself some breathing room in the office. Today, we'll talk about how to take advantage of your throttled down-time.

If you employ throttling in your job, by now you should have at least 50% of your work-time free. So what do you do with all this free time? This is where you learn to make yourself "valuably scarce" so that you can be out of the office while your coworkers still think of you as a hard-working, valuable resource. The key here is to make sure you are on more than one project, ideally staffed by different employees in different parts of the building, or even different buildings. In some cases, it means you have to volunteer for extra work. Don't worry, this will play to your advantage. Now, you have two projects to work on, and hopefully they are both separate enough that no one on one project knows what's going on with the other project.

This is where the fun begins. Now, at any given moment, if people see you are not in your office, the assumption will be that you are doing something with the other project, and that you are clearly working very hard. The very same scene for a person with only one project might lead them to believe that you were just skipping out on work. But not only are you clearly working hard, you volunteered for extra work!

So go ahead and take that 2 hour lunch... each project will think you are working on the other project, and you can rest assured knowing you will still get your work done because you employ throttling.

posted by Rainmayun at 10:11 AM -