To speak with my boss regarding work load

[Yorkyh]

Hi all,

I'm struggling quite a lot with work at the minute. I've been at the company 4.5 years and its always been fast paced and high workload, however recently due to a mixture of staff leaving and a particular colleague not pulling his weight, I have been passed a lot more work to do.

Said colleague has lied about tasks saying he's done them, and hasn't, or simply hasn't started things and since August I have had to take this work on. As a result of his actions the client we work for has requested that he doesn't work for him no longer and as a result he now has a reduced work load. My argument to my boss when informed of this was that it's a bit frustrating as he has lied/underperformed as a result has less workload, whereas I have more.

To add into the mix, I had breast cancer last year with the whole chemo, surgery etc age 29/30 and remain on preventative treatment for 10 years (with ifs own side effects). Some days are a struggle for me and I had just got to a point where I felt I could manage again and now this has got my truly behind. What has pushed me to seek opinions today is that I've been asked to complete some more tasks by the end of this week, which I simply do not have time to get done as I am majorly behind on other things. Without revealing what I do, I manage 96 of 'X', some of which have their own smaller 'x's', one example being 47. No other colleague manages this amount with the most someone else does being 60 odd.

Am I being unreasonable to raise this issue and if not, how best do I go about it?

Thanks ☺️

You keep emotions out of it, use facts and numbers, don't mention lazy colleague.

Boss, I have 20 items to do by Friday and I have capacity for 10. Please tell me which ten are most important so I can prioritise, and who I can pass the other items over to.

Dear Boss,

My current workload is not manageable in the time I have available. These are the tasks I have and my deadlines for this month, along with estimated time to complete them:

List of tasks

I cannot complete all these tasks to a satisfactory standard by their deadlines, so I’d like instruction on how best to prioritise them, which deadlines are flexible, and which tasks, if any, you would prefer to pass to another colleague.

Yorkyh

No decent boss expects their workers to do more than their hours allow working at a reasonable pace, and this passes the problem up the chain to your boss where it belongs. Providing a breakdown does a lot of the work for them.

A lot of bosses (me included in the past) will keep piling on work until they get push back.

By law your workplace has to make reasonable adjustments. It sounds like you're overwhelmed so perhaps you should arrange a meeting with your manager and explain how much work you have and say that you would appreciate help with lessening it. Outline the extra work because of staff shortage and say that you often feel the effects of your treatment and can't keep up.

Try to come up with a compromise and document everything.