Love/hate relationship with work craziness

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planet planet
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Love/hate relationship with work craziness

Post by planet planet »

I have a love/hate relationship with work being crazy busy. In sales, obviously that's a good thing, so it's more love than hate. It just stresses me out where if I get personal texts or calls during the day, I'm short/snippy. How do you react to being crazy busy, project deadlines, etc. at work? Is it adrenaline pumping go time or super stressful?

Arthur Dent
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Re: Love/hate relationship with work craziness

Post by Arthur Dent »

It depends a lot on the reason for it. If something unexpected and urgent comes or just the inevitable activity finishing a long project, I'm fine with it and find the experience invigorating. To often, though, crisis is engineered by a combination of management incompetence and/or mendacity withe expectation that employees must kill themselves to make up for bad/cheap resource decisions. Regardless, I need some recovery time so my life and health don't fall apart.

planet planet
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Re: Love/hate relationship with work craziness

Post by planet planet »

Arthur Dent wrote:It depends a lot on the reason for it. If something unexpected and urgent comes or just the inevitable activity finishing a long project, I'm fine with it and find the experience invigorating. To often, though, crisis is engineered by a combination of management incompetence and/or mendacity withe expectation that employees must kill themselves to make up for bad/cheap resource decisions. Regardless, I need some recovery time so my life and health don't fall apart.
Completely agree! My issue is the "what have you done for me lately" aspect of sales that's inevitable. Doesn't matter that you had a company record breaking month the month before which equates to 3-4 x your quota (3.5 mos worth of quota), they still are pressing us the following month despite no compelling event. I'm working towards long term relationships and I'm not going to be the "boy who cried wolf" where every month we're trying to drag stuff forward and put pressure on my clients monthly.

I know they knew we did extraordinary things to pull deals forward and get them done for our partners at their EOY/EOQ and deep down they know it's going to be a dry month after "draining the swamp", but they still push. That's my biggest pet peeve in sales. At which point do you trust your salespeople to attain their number at their own pace (assuming they know their clients well enough)? I've learned to ignore most of it and manage my own business. As of Jan. I only work with larger STL area clients and I'm not going to put the relationship in jeopardy by pushing for some imaginary month end (meaning we're not a publicly traded company, so it really doesn't matter if a PO comes in a week later).

Conversely, working in IT, which I assume are the deadlines and "emergencies" you're under, AD, I can't believe how hard these companies work their employees.

Comp time off should be mandatory. In other words, that's what a company does to keep their best employees. If you're there for them in crunch time, you should be encouraged to take time off. But I know that's not how it is.

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JCShutout
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Re: Love/hate relationship with work craziness

Post by JCShutout »

I don't take non emergency personal calls at work, with the exception of my lunch break if I feel like calling people back. (I usually don't) I don't take ANY work calls on personal time.

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