Countdown to out of office

Jeremy Elwood

Idon’t know when the world’s dictionaries began electing a word or phrase of the year, but I’m willing to bet that if they had been doing it during the 1980s, ‘‘trickle down’’ would have been a perennial contender.

It was used primarily to refer to economic gain or other benefits being drip-fed from the richest to the less fortunate, but more often than not it turned out to be a harbinger of false hope.

As the calendar year draws to a close, though, a very real trickle down begins. Somewhere around mid-November, people begin to clear their desks by pushing all of the last-minute, annoying little jobs off of one side, to fall on to the desks of those sitting directly below them in the pecking order.

If you work in a company, it goes something like this: your CEO realises that she’s ignored a bunch of emails for most of the year, and rather than delete them and start over in January, she forms them into an action document that gets sent to your manager. He then divvies up the various ‘‘requests’’ to your department head, and they hand these last-minute tasks out to you and your co-workers like the least welcome Secret Santa ever. You then end up with a pile of calendar alerts, unnecessary meetings and longterm strategy demands to go along with your own personal end-of-year cleanouts. And if you’re lucky enough to have people working under you, you continue the waterfall down the chain, until you can finally shut everything down, usually just in time to fit in some last-minute Christmas shopping.

If you’re a freelancer, it can be even worse. Rather than one direct flow, there can be a dozen rivulets cascading in, drenching you before pooling around your feet, because you represent the final pond at the bottom of the cliff.

I’m currently ignoring requests stretching far into next year. Any idea what you’ll be doing on a Thursday afternoon next October? Me neither, but apparently it’s vitally important that I find out so that someone else can cross off that particular box on their administrative Advent Calendar.

Hey, it’s not that we don’t already have enough going on in these last damp days of December, right? It’s usually such a relaxing month.

So sure, sweep that pile of unanswered correspondence, unread survey results and unnecessary paperwork my way. I’ll get onto it just as soon as I figure out how many people are coming to dinner on December 25, how I’m going to get my own work finished before the year ticks over and what I’m meant to be doing on Wednesday a year from now.

Michele A’Court

It is the workers’ equivalent of musical chairs – when the year stops, whose desk is it on? Except in this scenario, we’re the chairs, and if the task lands on us, we lose.

You can see it in a low-key way on any given Friday – that sudden flurry of emails from people just before wine o’clock, asking one more question about a shared project, or announcing the sudden completion of their responsibilities and it’s over to you.

Between the lines, read: ‘‘This has been sitting on my To Do List all week and now I’m making it your problem – hitting send now – Huzzah! Have a chill weekend, pal, see you Monday.’’

But at the end of year, these ‘‘To Do List tickoffs’’ go from amateur level to professional. I get it. I’m a list-ticker, too. I operate three lists at any one time – tasks for the month (it makes me feel less anxious if I can squeeze it all, singlespaced, onto one A4 page), one for the week (that’s the one that makes me nauseous) and a small calming one just for the day.

And I don’t just tick – I scratch firm and heavy lines through jobs done. Rubbing them out in a style that has less to do with erasing, and more in the spirit of a Mafia hit job. Concrete boots and swimming with the fishes. Disappeared.

You can damn well bet I’ll be hoping to make all three To Do Lists resemble a heavily redacted SIS file by Christmas. But 2018 has a special challenge because none of us knows if year’s end is Friday December 21, or Monday – Christmas Eve. Kia kaha to anyone working that last Monday, dealing with Friday Flurries from anyone who saved a day of annual leave to bridge that mighty gap.

Hot tips, then. Be aware that everyone is most focused on tidying up 2018, so throw them with ‘‘going forward’’ queries. Fire off a group email about next April’s conference by asking for their dietary requirements. Include a general query about their preferred travel times for that event in September.

For anything they want you to action before you tidy your desk and leave your peace lily standing in a bowl of water, divert them with requests for clarification before you are able to proceed. ‘‘Sure, I can order the balloons – just let me know what colour.’’

If they’re too quick and come back with ‘‘red’’, go big. Try: ‘‘Just a thought: do balloons fit within our sustainability policy?’’

If they’re onto it, they’ll come back with: ‘‘Good point – please forward to Health & Safety.’’

Just pray H&S don’t activate their out-of-office auto-reply before you can get to yours.