The e-mail from my boss probably came as a result of a couple things that have happened lately when I have come in to work on Sundays. I thought what I needed to do was static and certain. However (and I don't want to bog any of us down on details), there was a flood of post-holiday work that was left over one Sunday. Along with that, I had been asked via e-mail on a previous Sunday by my other boss (she was not at work, she apparently e-mailed me from her home) to specifically process several forms that were in the pipeline. Normally I would let them pass if I didn't get around to it before I had to leave, and for Sundays I was (initially) expected to work only four hours. But the following day this same boss talked to me following up on those forms.
She did not explicitly say it, but I got the impression that these forms represented a type of form that needed to be done on Sundays. That thought was reinforced (at least in my mind) on a subsequent Sunday when she asked (via e-mail again) to process these other forms that were just sitting around. So I come to this Sunday, and this gargantuan backlog of these types of forms (maybe, oh, a hundred of them?) that I had come to believe needed to be done. I stayed six hours that Sunday doing them all. By law, if you stay six hours, you really need to stay 6 1/2, because you are required at that point to take a half-hour for lunch. I did not do that. Moreover, there were other ... um, folders that I needed to do, which was the main task I thought I had to do on Sundays, and in my mind I needed to shunt those off until I did these priority forms first.
Then it gets weird, and I hope you can understand what I'm saying. The day after this, I was approached by my other boss as to why these folders, filled with these forms I had initially done first when I began working Sundays, were done so late in the day. (It dawned on me recently that all these forms are tracked as soon as they enter our building; someone knows where a specific form is at a given time, and that someone likely wants that form fully done when possible.) Later that day, this boss e-mails me a priority list of what to do on Sundays. To be honest, it didn't quite line up with what she told me that morning. So this past Sunday (not yesterday but the Sunday before) I did the work according to what she told me to do. But, even then, I stayed five hours instead of four because these "main" folders, what I thought was my main task when I started working on Sundays, was not completely done. There were folders that I still needed to touch -- not do, but touch, because they were empty. But I "did" them, and I left at around 3.
I think that prompted my main/real boss to finally spell everything out for me in that e-mail on Friday whereby he gave me a numbered list of what to do first, then second, then third, etc. And, maybe more important, he told me what had to be done on Sunday and what could wait. Finally, he said in clear terms that unless the shipment is late due to an ice storm or truck accident, I should not be there more than four hours. Fair enough. Armed with that checklist, I completed what I had to do yesterday/Sunday by 2 o'clock.
I saw my boss' e-mail Friday morning. I was working at The Third Department that day, filling in for someone, when a series of things came in. Things come in in The Third Department, and I'm still trying to figure out how to do them ... and when. My co-worker pointed out that there were some forms in a particular folder that needed to be done right then and there. That got me to thinking: How serious is doing that task? I was matching up forms with affidavits that provided missing information; do I just drop everything in order to process these, uh, priority forms?
And that prompted me to e-mail my supervisor for that department, even though she went home for the day by the time I decided to create that e-mail. I saw her reply yesterday/Sunday; they're fairly important, because those forms have to do with accidents, and investigations into them are ongoing and need to be wrapped up very quickly. Good to know, although I probably need to actually drop everything and process them before I fully understand how big of a priority they are, if that makes sense.
I appreciate these rankings of stuff I need to do. I frequently like freelancing in my duties, but when I am in a bind, dealing with a bunch of things I could do, it is good to know from my higher-ups what are priorities over what. I have gotten in trouble for not doing these forms first, to which I say I didn't know. I do now, and I like that. I wonder, however, if having these tasks spelled out to me in the order they want them done makes me look like I am incapable of recognizing what needs to be done and what can wait. Being told what to do clears up a lot of misunderstanding, but I'm afraid my bosses are disappointed that they needed to do even that for me.
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