Doing Self Generated Work

So when you are not doing "Donkey's Work", what are you doing? You might be doing the "self generated" work. ;-) Since this is another of my coined terminologies i will not inflict any more curiosity on you and will explain what I mean by it.

Well it happens in an organisation that some people are continuously being monitored. they are constantly asked about their progress and are assigned various different tasks, one after the other, whether they have finished the previous one or not.

Then there is this category to which the boss says, "I will discuss this with you later". And this "later" in the sentence is a PAIN as it never seems to come. These people do all their groundwork, prepare each and every aspect of the assigned task and then start anxiously waiting for a few moments of attention from the boss.

And during these moments of wait one can get really impatient. It's like you are longing for work, tasks, assignments but all you are getting is a LONG waiting period. Now how long can you keep yourself entertained with the net surfing or chatting (or even blogging). SO you have to find something to do that can be regarded as "work" and can be appended to the already completed tasks. Something that would also not be responsible of wasting your precious company time.

And this, dear reader, is the "self generated" work.

As an example, your boss asked you to make an outline for a document only to discuss later to finalize it. So you can very cleverly take the next step and star filling in the outline. That is self-generated work. Your boss asked you to make an ER Diagram, and if you make it and make a Data Dictionary along with it, that is doing "self generated" work.

Some might say that there is no need to do what you are not asked to do. But i disagree here. When you work in a company you sort of understand the patterns of work there. You know that you will ultimately be asked to do that self-generated work of yours, so why not be wise and do it well ahead of time. ;-)


PS: It is ironic that it happens, and nobody likes it (at least not me), but it does happen, honest!