Spoken English（040）

Bad behaviors

Discrimination in an employment situation

Erratic or aggressive driving that endangers other

Jokes or remarks that mock another’s race, gender, age, disability, sexual preference or religion

Children behaving aggressively

Littering(including trash,spitting, pet waste)

Misuse of handicapped privileges

Smoking in non-smoking places or smoking in front of non-smokers without asking

Taking credit for someone else’s work

Deal with being overworked

In the information age, when almost everyone in every office is a knowledge worker, we are paid to process information. And since there’s an infinite amount of information, there is an infinite amount of work. For everyone.

So your boss is probably giving you enough work every week to fill three weeks--- if you let it. If you work a certain way, it could also fill only three days.

My point is that people who feel overworked in some respects choose to be overworked.Here are five choices to make instead:

1.Force your boss to prioritize

Because processing information is not an objective task, you can do a good job or a bad job or any kind of job in between. which is to say that you don’t have to do a great job with everything. You can’t,right? Because your boss is giving you too much work.

So you have some choices. First, you can try to force your boss to prioritize, Say to him or her, “ if you want me to do project z perfectly, then you need to get project w,x and y off my plate.”

Maybe your boss will think project z is so important that he or she will clear your plate. But most likely, your boss will say, “Forget it, you need to do everything.” This is an open invitation to start experimenting with cutting corners

2.If your boss won’t prioritize, do it yourself.

Please don’t tell me you don’t believe in cutting corners. It’s the layman’s term for prioritizing, and you probably perfected it as a way of life in college. In fact, cutting corners is what college teachs best.

Over the course of a semester, you were assigned sixteen 400-page books to read, plus you had to write papers about them. you also had to show up for classes to find out what was going to be on the tests. Of course, there was no way you could read all 6,400 pages you were assigned--- that would be impossible in the allotted time.

So you figured out what you could skip. You determined that the best way to get out of the reading was to go to the lectures, because professor's lecture is about what interests them, and tests reflect their interests.

Now back to your workplace, where you have too much work to do. Here is how the losers handle it: they complain about being overworked. They keep accepting more work, and trying to do it perfectly, and complain. And their bosses keep dumping it on them and saying there’s nothing they can do about the workload. Meanwhile, neither of them is prioritizing, neither of them is taking responsibility for the situation, and each is blaming the other.

If your boss insists on giving you more work than you can do, you should start cutting corners, Do everyting very quickly, and ignore the idea that it needs to be done perfectly--- it can’t all be done perfectly. Your boss refuses to prioritize for you, so you will have to do everything as best as you can.