How To Tell Your Manager That You Are Overworked

Be it remote work or on-site work, having a hectic schedule full of a hundred different tasks to complete before you kick off is no walk in the park. Even if you are working from the comfort of your own home, having too much work can be stressful.

Almost 70% of the US full-time workforce are working from home, post-pandemic. 75% of these workers believe that they are just as productive as when they are working on-site or maybe even more. Even though working from home has its advantages, there are slight drawbacks.

Remote Work Spurs Extra Productivity

It’s easy to get the lines between work and home blurry when you work remotely. Remote work instills a feeling of extra productivity in employees. They are then compelled to work more than they would have at the office. Workers save a lot of time when working from home than when they have to commute to work every day. This gives them the incentive to put in more hours.

Before you even know it, you’ve got your plate piled with more than you can chew. You find yourself working through lunch and teatime to deliver all the work on time. This behavior will ultimately contribute to your stress levels. Owl Labs conducted a study that found that full-time employees work an extra 26 hours a month while remote. Workers are beginning to feel the strain of overwork now, which contributes to employee burnout.

Pros Of Extra Work

Taking on extra work will highlight your ability to handle more responsibilities. Your manager will notice how you show an interest in what you do. Taking on more work will indicate that you are not doing the bare minimum for a paycheck. You also would get to handle new responsibilities and learn new things. Other than that, all the extra work you take can be used as leverage when you ask for a raise or promotion in the future.

Cons Of Extra Work

One downside to saying yes to every piece of work that comes your way is that there will come a day when you will be stretched too thin. Soon you will have too much work on your plate and your desk will be overflowing with uncompleted filing folders. Once you agree to a few requests that go beyond your scope from your manager, you will become the easy way for them to handle any extra work that comes along. It won’t be such a bad thing if you can cope with the amount of work.

Telling Your Manager You Have Too Much Work

Before you decide to take the matter to your manager, you can do some research on your level.

First, see if you really are being overworked

Maybe the workload seems too big for you, but in reality, it is quite a normal number of tasks for a person in your profession. Sometimes, you might feel like you have too much work when you have something going on in your personal life, like childcare, which consumes a big chink of your day. You can speak to a few colleagues and compare workloads to see if you are really being overworked.

If you still feel like you want to speak with your manager, schedule a meeting

Ask your manager to give you a portion of their time to have a conversation about lightening your workload. Instead of just walking in, try to prepare some material to justify your request. Preparing a list of your daily tasks should be the first thing you do before you go in for the meeting with your manager. If you can, try to measure the time taken for each task. Sometimes, your manager might be unaware that a task takes so long to complete.

Have your own set of solutions for the problem

Prepare a list of solutions that you think might work. You can suggest rearranging the deadlines of projects, asking for more resources on the team, or even asking for some tasks to be delegated to the rest of the team.

Chances are that your manager didn’t realize you were being overworked until you mentioned the issue. Now that it is out in the open, you can expect positive changes to happen around your schedule.