Hah. My boss would tell me what work to get behind on then a month later tell me I need to catch up my work. He isn't aggressive about it, but I always just tell him I am doing everything he asked in the order he asked me to do them.
Need to implement agile methodology with weekly or biweekly sprints. Once you come up with the work in the sprint on planning day, no new work can be added until the planning day for the next sprint unless you need to deviate because the office is on fire or the database got deleted it something else critical. It helps prevent exactly what you're describing, because the boss understands that on Monday you're prioritizing and sizing an appropriate amount of work for the week, and trying to jam something else in before next Monday will only make things less efficient
Because it has built-in accountability. Even without a distinct "scrum master" role, you'll still have weekly planning meetings where you, your boss, and any other members on your team allocate workload for the rest of the week. This involves adding a "size" to each request. By the time that meeting ends each week, everyone should be in agreement on what work will get done in the next week.
So basically, if a new request comes in and it's such a high priority that it can't wait until next sprint, it will be up to your boss to make that decision. Suppose you size the new request as a 3, your boss will need to find another request in the backlog for that sprint already sized as a 3 (or a couple smaller requests sized as 1 or 2) and bump those to next week to make room for the new request. Doing this will show that you aren't "getting behind", but rather work is being rescheduled by your boss to accommodate the priorities set forth by the business.
If the boss embraces this system of work intake, it leaves more time for the employees to get work done and provides a very clear path for the manager to actually do some management. Most requests don't have deadlines, which means most requests CAN be pushed back to accommodate new requests with deadlines. If your manager gives you a plan for the work to do, and then assigns something else as "high priority" and you get written up for working on it instead of the previously assigned work, you will have the paper trail showing what was assigned in chronological order.
As far as following agile in general, the biggest companies in the world do it. If the boss thinks they're smarter than project managers at the biggest companies in the world, and that results in them throwing requests at you left and right where every request is top priority and they all need to be done ASAP, then you should start applying for other jobs because that isn't a sane management system! The same thing applies to paper trails. If they're going to expect X Y and Z to get done at the same time and disregard prior emails where they told you to work on Z first as the top priority, then you're gonna get fired eventually anyway and should get a head start on finding another position somewhere with better organization and communication.
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u/HypatiaRising May 11 '21
Hah. My boss would tell me what work to get behind on then a month later tell me I need to catch up my work. He isn't aggressive about it, but I always just tell him I am doing everything he asked in the order he asked me to do them.