Just Say When

This seems to be a growing issue in the world, as more and more things become lost in the shuffle of day to day survival everything seems to lean toward either the here and now or the intangible 'someday'.

It becomes even more of an issue when you need to get another party involved to make 'someday' happen sooner rather than later. I've found this to be true in many settings but none so profound as at work.

When I first started we were basically locked down to the desktop computer - anything outside of that went to someone else to resolve. Trouble is we have never had a way of knowing when anything would be resolved, and being in the trenches when our users call asking the dreaded 'when' questions without and answer is both unsettling and messy (mentally for sure, physically on occasion).

So in order to save as much pain and suffering we have slowly been taking away other duties that were handled by someone else and doing it ourselves. This has been double edged to say the least - as now we have a little bit of control to answer a few more 'when' questions but have increased our blanket service load in the process.

The interesting thing is that as a general rule of thumb we have a very understanding workplace, and a lot of stress can be diverted just by giving them an idea of when it will happen - keep in mind you need to keep that estimate or at least keep them in the loop or your stress will return with venomous repercussions :)



I've gotten to the point where for the most part I no longer promise anything time related - well maybe something way out in the distant future that if we can't get it done by then, there is definitely a problem that someone forgot to tell us about. (ex. we are in May so Christmas/New Years sounds good - note no year has been provided :P ) And if I do - it's usually something I can either do alone that requires no additional asstance or it's with someone I know I can trust to help me with it.

It seems like as times have changed, and technology has sped up communication - good/bad/faulty and the rest we are grasping for something solid to hold. A place that we can claim and state with assurance that it will be a certain way at a certain time.

Too bad life doesn't work that way - for now matter how hard we try to nail jello to a wall there's no way to keep it there for long. Life just fluctuates too much and is only changing faster as the world seems to speed up.

Maybe we just need more buy-in. . .