Ask a Manager

This is a transcription of the Ask a Manager podcast episode “I Don’t Have Enough Work.”

Alison: If you’re frequently overloaded with work, it might sound nice to have too little to do – but in reality, regularly not having enough work to do can be incredibly boring and it can make work really drag on. Today’s guest finds herself chronically under-worked. Hi and welcome to the show.

Guest: Thanks for having me.

Alison: So you sent me a letter saying that you’ve never really had a job that didn’t have significant downtime, long stretches where you had nothing to do. I’m going to summarize my understanding from your letter and then we’ll get into it. You’ve been in your current job for a year. You get great performance reviews. You make yourself available for new work and you volunteer to take on work from stressed colleagues, but sometimes there just isn’t more work to do and your workload is dependent on things outside of your control. To fill the time, you’ve tried things like reading online publications in your field, but that only takes up so much time. And you feel like you might spend too much time on your phone or online and you’re wondering if you should feel guilty about that and what you should be doing with your time. Am I getting all that right?

Guest: Yeah. That’s pretty much the whole situation for me.

Alison: One thing that I thought was really interesting is that you mentioned that this has happened in every job that you’ve ever had and that you’ve tried talking to your bosses about it. One boss said they didn’t care and said that you could do whatever you wanted with the extra time, and then without warning you got fired by a higher up for spending too much time online, which I can imagine would really freak you out about how to handle this now.

Guest: Yeah, I’m pretty paranoid now and I think for good reason. That was a weird situation. I was working for a startup, they did not have very good HR practices. But that’s made me extra nervous when I don’t have anything to do because I really want to make sure that I’m doing everything that I should be doing, and that what I’m doing with the extra time I have isn’t something that’s going to get me into trouble.

Alison: Yeah, absolutely. So how much downtime are we talking about and how frequently?

Guest: It’s really hard to say. My work is on a two-week cycle, and we’re working quite a bit ahead of time – so there will be some two-week cycles where I don’t have any pressing projects so I’m only doing things that are not the primary function of my job. And then there will be two-week cycles where I’ll have a really busy period and so I’ll have no downtime whatsoever, and I’ll feel like I don’t have any time to hardly breathe or think. But for the most part I would say probably at least a couple hours a day, maybe more.

Alison: Okay, that is a lot. I think it’s probably significant that you mentioned that it’s happened in every job you’ve ever had, because this is definitely a thing that happens and I actually get a bunch of letters from people who are just really bored at work and wondering, “What do I do with all of this time,” but you don’t normally see it so consistently over and over through the course of someone’s career. And so that makes me think that it’s either something about the field that you’re in, or the sorts of jobs, or that you work much faster than most people you’re around. And I wonder, do you have any sense of which it might be?

Guest: I don’t think it’s necessarily the field because I have a master’s degree in a different field than what I work in now, so over the past four years I’ve been migrating my career from the field that I have my degree in into a new field – so I’ve actually spanned a couple of different types of careers in that time. I think I work fast. I feel very confident that I work faster than most of my colleagues. And sometimes I worry, is that because they’re doing a much more thorough job than I’m doing, or is it just something about the way that I work, that I finish things quicker for unknown reasons to me based on my colleagues.

Alison: Right. So, either you’re super fast and that’s great, that’s your super power – or maybe they’re taking a more complicated or thorough approach. So that would be unnerving if you’re not sure which it is. Do you have coworkers who are in the same kind of role as you and who have the same projects?

Guest: Yeah, I’m on a team of I think eight and there are three tiers of us and I’m the lowest tier. I’m a more entry level position and then there’s a middle and a top tier. I work in a government function and I have some colleagues who’ve been there for almost 20 years in similar roles, so they get much more complicated projects than I get. But even when looking at my colleagues on the same level and one step above, I still see that we have more similar types of projects and number of projects, but I am still finding myself with more time on my hands than they do.

Alison: What is your relationship with your boss like? Do you have pretty good rapport?

Guest: Yeah, I have a really good relationship with my boss, which is the best thing about this job compared to previous jobs I’ve had, and I really like working for him. I feel like I can be frank with him. He’s maybe a little less willing to give direction then I might like. But in general, he’s been super happy with my work and I think he was a little bit skeptical about hiring me just because I don’t have a background in the field and I know that he’s been really pleased with how I’ve done over the past year.

Alison: I recommend that you talk to him – and actually stepping back a little bit and just going big picture and advice in general for work stuff, I think when you have good rapport with your boss and you have almost any kind of big picture work question like this, it’s good to start with your boss and just kind of lay it out. And so how to apply that in your case: I might sit down and say, “I’m finding myself with a lot of downtime. Obviously, our work goes through cycles. I’ll have two weeks where I’m really busy, but then I’ll have two weeks where I have a ton of downtime and I want to make sure, first of all, that there’s not something I’m missing — that you’re not looking for me to be spending more time on projects before I turn them in, or maybe other people are doing a more thorough job – and I want to make sure there’s not something like that that I’m missing. But absent something like that, I also just want to talk to you about the best ways to use that time.” And who knows what might come of that. That might lead to you getting more responsibilities. It might lead to being told, “You know what, this work is very ebb and flow and it’s totally normal. And we know that you’re going to have periods where you’re really busy so we’re completely fine with you working at a very leisurely pace during the times when you do have a lot of downtime.” I could go on all kinds of different directions, but I think it would be a really interesting conversation to have if you haven’t done it already.

Guest: Yeah, and I think some of that I haven’t done, but some of it I have done. It’s only been a short period of time that I’ve been doing it, so I have always told my boss that I have time on my hands, which in some cases has actually worked out really well in that I have had colleagues transfer projects to me. And often those are pretty interesting projects that I get to work on and I fully take those over from a colleague. And I know my boss has started to see me as a go-to person for doing extracurricular projects, which hasn’t necessarily led to a lot of firm work, but it has led to me being the representative from our department on a lot of different citywide initiatives, which has been really interesting. But I haven’t said, “What should I be doing with my downtime?” That’s not a conversation we’ve had yet.

Alison: So you might do that, or a version of that. And I will also say, keep in mind there’s a difference between just saying, “Hey, just wanted to let you know I have extra time on my hands if there’s anything that you want me to do,” which is the way that a lot of people have this conversation, versus the way I think you should have the conversation, which is more: “I really want to make sure that I’m staying busy. I’m finding myself with a lot of downtime. I want to find out from you how you would like to see me spending that.” And then also potentially part two of that, which we’ll talk about a little bit more in a minute, but part two might be more of, “It’s really important to me to stay busy. Can we talk about ways that we might be able to make that happen?” The first way is sort of like, “Hey FYI, just letting you know in case there’s something you would like to give me,” and the second way is more focused on what you want to get out of your job and your career, and it might make sense to go a little bit more in that direction.

Guest: Sure. That makes sense.

Alison: I want to talk in more detail about ways that you might approach your boss about it. I also want to say I think there are a bunch of smaller things that you can do to fill the time, but I don’t think any of them will really solve the problem enough to make things feel substantially different in the long term. As you said, you can only spend so much time reading publications in your field. You could do networky things – you could find online groups related to the type of work that you do, and you could answer questions there and lend your expertise to help solve other people’s problems. But again, that’s only going to take up so much time. Another option: you could embark on some sort of major learning initiative, pinpointing some skill that you’d like to learn and spending a chunk of time learning it. But at some point you’ll learn it and then you’ll be back in the same position.

If this were the only job where this had come up for you, those are the sorts of things I’d recommend. But because it keeps happening and I don’t think those sorts of projects are going to be enough to fill an entire career’s worth of downtime – and it’s also just not great for your quality of life to feel like you’re always scrambling and searching around for the next thing to occupy you. At some point it’s really going to start feeling like you’re just doing those things to kill time, because that is kind of the truth of it and no one wants to feel like they’re just killing time month after month.

So given that, rather than taking that kind of piecemeal approach, there’s a few different things that I would do here. The first one is, like we were talking about, talk to your boss about the situation. If you can, it might be helpful to go to him with a few proposals of ways that you could fill up your role. I know you work for government, which makes this a little bit harder to do, but I wonder if there are potentially whole new responsibilities that you could take on that would be not just a project that’ll keep you busy for a couple of weeks, but an ongoing thing that will fill that time more permanently. Or if there’s someone on your team who’s overworked who would welcome getting a particular ongoing responsibility off their plate – maybe you could propose taking that on. And I’d also spend some time thinking about what’s not getting done in your office right now, or not getting done consistently or getting done well, and thinking about whether there’s something that you could propose spending your time on that would help fill that need. It doesn’t necessarily have to be a big new major initiative. It could be something in the background, like… these aren’t going to be great examples, but it could be something like: “We don’t have up-to-date documentation on any of our processes, so let me put that together.” Or “I’d like to create better training materials for new staff.” I would just say think creatively about it. If you’ve ever found yourself thinking, “Oh, I wish we had ,” or “It would be great if we did Y,” there might be something in there that you could propose work for yourself around.

And you also mentioned that there’s these tiers of seniority on your team, so one option – I don’t know how your office works and maybe this would be totally tone deaf and wildly premature – but one option is to think about whether to push for a promotion to a higher tier so that you are taking on more complicated work. It might be that the fact that you are finishing the work at your level so quickly is a reflection of the fact that you might be ready for higher level work.

Guest: Sure. Yeah. And our work is a little different with being a government, so in our office I do the same exact type of work as people in a higher tier than me, but they’ve typically been there for longer, so they don’t hire from those roles externally. I’m pretty much on a track to, when someone leaves, move up. But that has no firm timeline on it. And I don’t think it would affect my workload at all besides the fact that just being there longer is I think one of the key things that leads more complicated projects.

Alison: That makes sense. I wouldn’t decide for your boss that that’s not a feasible solution, because your boss is going to have a different perspective – and maybe your boss will completely agree with that and say, “Yeah, it’s just, put in the time and when someone leaves, we’ll have one of those more senior slots open up.” But it’s possible that your boss will look at what you’re doing and the speed and the skill that you’re doing it with and think it actually does make sense to maybe promote you on a faster track than what’s normally done on your team. Maybe not, obviously we don’t know, but I think it’s worth talking about. And if it feels kind of tone deaf to propose it, I think you could propose it without being that explicit. You could say something like, “I’d really like to take on more challenging projects like X or Y and I know that I have the time to do it. Is that something that you would be open to?” And if the answer is no or not right now, you could say, “Is that something that you think is a possibility in the near future? What do you think that timeline might look like?” And if you get more of a brush-off, then at least that’s good data for you to have that you can factor into your thinking about what’s going on in your situation.

Guest: Sure. Yeah, I think those are all really good suggestions and when I took this role – the role that I’m in now is a lot more of a narrow focus than the role that I came from, which is also within the same government entity. And so my boss and I had some really good conversations around that time when I was transitioning about what types of work I could do that would allow me to have a little bit broader impacts But those are things that I kind of put on the back burner as I was learning this role and also are things that would really require some intense thought and coordination with other departments and other people I know in our organization. I wonder if maybe that’s kind of the tack I should take — trying to figure out if there are these kind of innovative projects that I could work on that are not something that my boss would be driving, but more something that I would be driving.

Alison: Yeah. And I think that kind of thing is easier for a manager to say yes to, because if you would be the one driving it and doing a lot of the heavy thinking, that is an easier yes than if it’s another thing that gets added to his plate to figure out.

Guest: Sure.

Alison: Let me ask you this. I know you said this keeps happening to you. Has it always been government jobs? No, because you were at a startup at one point, so it’s been a range of sectors, right?

Guest: Yes, a wide range of sectors. I’ve worked in healthcare, I worked at a university, I worked for a startup, and now I’m in government.

Alison: I think you might just be really fast. If you had always been in the same field or the same sector, I was going to say – if it’s always going to be like this, if it’s something about your field, do you like your work enough that you’re going to be able to be reasonably happy knowing that this is likely to be the pace for a long time or does it bother you enough that it would be worth thinking about doing something very different or in a very different type of workplace. But it doesn’t sound like that’s the situation at all. It doesn’t sound like this is being driven by the type of job or the type of field. It sounds like you’re fast. And this is one of the burdens of being fast.

Guest: Right. And I will say that this job is the best of all the jobs I’ve had in terms of keeping me busy and I think part of that is because we have such clear deadlines and clear workload. I always know that my projects are done, and they’re completed, and I know exactly what’s on my plate. And that’s really helpful to me, especially when I have this downtime, is just to be able to know that there’s, there’s not something I’m missing. There’s not some sort of weird amorphous projects I’m supposed to be working on that don’t have deadlines. It’s very clear and for me that’s been really helpful, but there still is this extra time and I want to be thoughtful about how I’m using it.

Alison: Given that, I do think that this conversation with your boss where you lay it out for him is the best way to go. So, it’s not just, “Hey, I’ve got time on my hands if you need me,” but it’s more of, “This is something that I want to change about my job. Can we talk about whether it’s possible to do that? And if that’s not possible right now, can we talk about how I should be spending that time?”

And I think too, we should talk about the fear piece of this because anyone in your shoes, having had the experience you had where you were told that it was fine to do whatever you want with that downtime and then being penalized for it, would be really uncomfortable, I think, finding themselves in a situation in the future that looked very similar to how that one started out. So I think you could be pretty candid with your boss. You don’t have to get into what happened at the previous job if you don’t want to. But you can say, “My nightmare in this situation is thinking that it’s okay for me to relax when I do have those periods of downtime and think that it’s okay, and then discover down the road that it wasn’t okay and that it’s changing the way that I’m perceived or causing other sorts of problems. And so, I really want to make sure that I’m not going down that path.” And I think if you lay it out for him, you will probably hear something that’s very helpful in response.

Guest: Yeah, I think that’s true. And we had a recent conversation where I was a little bit more explicit about, “I’m available for other types of projects, I want to take on more work,” and he wasn’t necessarily planning on doing like a year end review, but he started to take some notes and talk about, “Okay, we can have this conversation and let me think about what options are available.”

Alison: Oh, that’s great. Whenever a boss starts taking notes in that kind of context, that’s a very good sign. That’s really good. So it sounds like the conversation has already started and it’s just a matter of keeping it going.

Guest: Yeah.

Alison: Good. Is there anything else about this that would be helpful to talk about or anything that is still making you feel uneasy?

Guest: Well, I did have an interesting conversation with him on Friday when a few of my colleagues had left early – I think they had previously arranged that with him – and I went to his office and I said, “Hey, I was thinking about leaving early.” It was like 2 pm on Friday. And I said, “Do you have any concerns with that?” And he said, “As long as you’ve completed your workload and you have that under control, you’re free to do whatever you want.” And so I left and that was great. And I came home and I had an early afternoon at home. I guess I’m just wondering, do you have any advice for navigating that, when I have both a workload that is not filling all my time and a boss who’s really flexible about schedules and things. How do you navigate both wanting more work to do, wanting to fill that time, and also wanting to come home and start on some yard projects early?

Alison: Yeah. It’s smart to think about it and not just take him at his word that every time you’re done with your work it’s fine to just leave because it sounds like that could result in you leaving two hours early every day. I would pay attention to what other people around you are doing and try to calibrate what you’re doing pretty closely to what the norm seems to be. That said, I wouldn’t give the same weight to what each person is doing. I would pay particular attention to what the people in good standing on your team are doing because there might be some people who are pulling the average way down who are leaving early a lot who, but who maybe aren’t super well thought of. So, I would calibrate according to what other people in good standing seem to do. And that doesn’t mean that you have to peg it to the exact number of hours or anything like that, but I would be basically in that ballpark.

I think too, if you’re ever feeling unsure, you can also lay that out for your boss too. You can say, “Hey, in the last few months I’ve taken off early a few times when my workload allowed it. To be totally honest with you, I feel weird about doing it. And I know that you’re really flexible and really great about this stuff, but I also wanted to make sure that you never feel uneasy about what I’m doing or think that I’m taking advantage. So I just want to check in with you.” And any manager is going to appreciate that, especially one who you already have good rapport with.

Guest: Yeah. Okay. Yeah, that’s good. I like all of this advice of just laying it out there and having these more frank conversations. And I feel good about that in the context that I already started a little bit of this conversation that was received really well and so I think I can have those other conversations too.

Alison: The fact that you have a good relationship with your boss and that he sounds pretty open and pretty reasonable makes this so much easier. If that weren’t the case, this would be a whole different, much more complicated conversations. So yeah, I think you can just lay it out for him and I think it’s totally fine to use him as a check on your thinking and to give you peace of mind if you ever are feeling like, “Ooh, I don’t know if the way that I’m navigating this is okay.” I think you can just ask, and you will probably get peace of mind from that.

Guest: Great.

Alison: Well, thank you so much for coming on the show. I hope this was helpful.

Guest: This was super helpful. Thank you so much for having me.

Alison: Thanks for listening to the Ask a Manager podcast. If you’d like to come on the show to talk through your own question, email it to podcast@askamanager.org – or you can leave a recording of your question by calling 855-426-9675. You can get more Ask a Manager at askamanager.org, or in my book Ask a Manager: How to Navigate Clueless Colleagues, Lunch-Stealing Bosses, and the Rest of Your Life at Work. The Ask a Manager show is a partnership with How Stuff Works and is produced by Paul Dechant. If you liked what you heard, please take a minute to subscribe, rate, and review the show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or Google Play. I’m Alison Green and I’ll be back next week with another one of your questions.

Transcript provided by MJ Brodie.

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