There’s a tendency in this line of work for there to be more work to do than is possible in the time allotted.
I think this is related to several factors.
- There will never be I.T. employees paid to sit around waiting for work.
- Some stakeholders will always fail to involve I.T. early enough
- Requests to outsource work get met with, “what are we paying you for,” attitudes
- Interruptions are always going to happen
- No matter how much you know, you will never know everything
It’s been hard for me to adapt to this. I often think that I’m failing to get things done on time or done correctly. I tend to blame myself for not knowing enough or failing to think of something that seems obvious in hindsight. This leads to a lot of feelings of guilt that probably aren’t warranted. (Unwarranted guilt is the mind’s way of creating an illusion of control.)
In the last two days, two people (including the CIO) have told me that it’s enough that I do my best. My brain doesn’t like to accept that, but what’s helping put it in perspective for me is that those other people have already accepted that I do my best! They have already hired me, retained me, promoted me, and frankly, continued to overload me with work.
People know I can’t get everything they’re asking me to do in the time they’ve given me to do it. They aren’t doing that because they want me to fail. They do it because they know they can depend on me to do my best to meet their needs.
When the first person called me a, “dependable,” person, I didn’t think that was a characteristic that described me. It took me realizing that my “failures” were evidence of my dependability. I did my best, and that was good enough for the people that it mattered to.
This idea that dependability is being “good enough” reminds me of the saying, “perfect is the enemy of done.”