White lie at work

[Namech3nge]

NC for obvious reasons.

I told a lie at work recently, basically I made an excuse to an external person as to why I was late with a piece of work.

The actual reason is that I found the work more time consuming/ more technical than I'd anticipated and I failed to leave myself enough time to prepare it so I missed a deadline by about an hour. This was my first time completing this piece of work and I had thought I'd done enough prep beforehand but obviously I was wrong. Lesson learnt and I will not make the same mistake twice.

However, I hate being late, I always put pressure on myself to make sure my work is to a good standard and this is the first deadline I've missed like this and I'm in a fairly new job so I was properly panicking trying to get it out on time. Like out in a rash level stressed. And I made an excuse and lied about why it was late. So fucking stupid and I wish I'd actually just been honest or just more vague. I never lie, this is totally not like me and now I'm actually panicking I'm going to get caught out and it will be worse for me. I'm so cross with myself and now I'm stewing on it and can't let it go. I was honest with my boss about missing the deadline but I didn't mention the excuse I told the external person.

Do I go to my boss and say what I did or do I just leave it and hope that it doesn't come back to bite me. Feel like such an idiot.

Leave it. I think you're punishing yourself enough over it they it won't happen again!

What excuse did you give? And how would anyone know? Nobody can see your thoughts. I worry about things like this too, but I don't see how you can get into trouble for this.

Of course don't grass yourself up. Presumably the client accepted your explanation and was ultimately happy with the work?

The only concern is if you keep finding tasks overwhelming or too time consuming. There's only so many excuses you can make. And if it's an ongoing thing it does need to be addressed.

Do you need more training, more assistance? Could your company change some of it's processes? Is the gap in expectation v what is really possible?

If you do need any support or things need to change it will come out in the end to your detriment if you keep covering it up.

@WeeBookworm Basically I blamed a tech issue that my manager would know is untrue. My worry is if the external person responds cc-ing in my manager then she'd find out that I lied. I honestly don't know how likely that is to happen though. This is why I try to never lie, I always get the fear that I'll get caught out.

@DiscoBob I think the client will be happy enough with the work although they haven't responded yet- I think everything I sent is up to scratch, it just involved a lot of information that took me a while to sift through and some of it was just tedious and took longer to actually compile into the correct format than I'd expected because normally I work at a fast pace. I just underestimated the time I needed to complete the task. If I was to do it again, I'd know exactly what I'm doing so I don't think there's a training issue as such, more that I need to be more generous with the time I allocate for things like this and I need to spend more time familiarising myself with the terminology and IT systems (which I am getting better with) so I can be more efficient.

The more I use them the easier they are getting to navigate, I just hadn't needed to use this particular platform in a good few months so I was rustier than i thought I'd be. I'll know to go back in and refresh myself on it more regularly going forward and to compile things as I go rather than at the end. So I know what I need to do in that respect. I'm generally competent at the work I do and I've never had a performance issue before. Just kicking myself that I didn't handle this in a better way.

I think in the unlikely event there are any repercussions, just be honest with your manager, say you panicked, and tell them it won't happen again. I don't think it's a big deal. But I know that I worry like this too so I understand. I'm sure it will be ok.