unsolicited advice

One Way to Tactfully Tell Your Boss You Are Drowning in Work

Photo: H. Armstrong Roberts/ClassicStock/Getty Images

Perhaps you feel, right this minute, that you are being quietly crushed under the avalanche of your work responsibilities. If so, what are you doing reading the internet? Get back to work, please. But first, you might be interested in a recent piece published in Harvard Business Review, which offers some decent advice in how to professionally and tactfully tell your boss: Help.

The best advice in the piece, to my mind, suggests that rather than presenting a list of complaints, instead come up with a first draft of solutions, and start from there. More specifically, the HBR piece suggests that for each problem, you should come up with three potential solutions. Maybe someone else can do some of your work; maybe some of your work is work that once made sense within your organization, but now no longer does, so you can drop it entirely.

That’s two. You can think of the third yourself, after you close this tab and get back to work.

One Way to Tactfully Tell Your Boss You Are Drowning in Work