Friend, Wake Up: You’re Not Inheriting the Company
This one I heard from a former coworker at an old job.
One time the company approved an unusually large budget increase, and someone had to design a full investment project to put it to use. From scratch. From the title page, literally. It had to be solid, because the amount was significant and would reshape how a whole area of the company worked. And that’s where the impossible work deadlines started.
One afternoon she got called into a meeting. That’s where she found out that she, because of her experience and being one of the few people in the company who actually knew the subject, had to design, put together, and present the entire project in under 24 hours, because it had to go in front of the board the next day and there was no more time to give. Her boss knew exactly how impossible that was: the work meant applying technical frameworks, researching, reading, cross-checking data, just to produce something that could actually carry her name. All he said was: “I know you can do it.”
The worst part is she did. She put together a solid document and a presentation ready to go, without sleeping a single hour, barely managing a shower before heading back to the office the next day. The kicker landed in the meeting itself, when she found out she hadn’t been the only one asked to design a project, she’d just been the only one who’d pulled it off in under 24 hours. Everyone else simply said they hadn’t made it and asked for eight more days. They got them.
At the end, she looked at her boss and said: “If there was room for an extension, why did I have to kill myself over this?” His answer: “I’m really sorry. Go get some sleep, and look at the bright side, we were first, and it’s already done, so you don’t have to pull another all-nighter.” She replied: “This is the first and last time I run myself into the ground for nothing.”
What she took from it:
- Your urgency is never anyone else’s urgency.
- Don’t sacrifice sleep, you never get those hours back.
- “Impossible work deadlines are mostly fiction, there’s always more time hiding somewhere they swore there wasn’t.
- And don’t believe anyone who tells you something is life or death, it almost never is.
For cases like this, there’s a mantra that works: if I don’t do this right now, does the world end? No, right? Then it can wait. Because the usual outcome, when someone asks you to rush something like that, is that your boss just files it away later. Turns out it wasn’t that urgent after all.
If you’ve got your own workplace story to share, write to me at jenniffer@guaduastudio.com and I’ll publish it anonymously in upcoming posts. Just make sure to close your story with what you learned from it, whatever good came out of it. Thanks.
