Hate to Be Pulled in All Directions at Work? Here’s How I (& You Can) Deal with It.

Experience is our best teacher

No one wants to be pulled into this meeting, that discussion, and copied in all emails throughout their workday.

I repeat. No one.

• Yes, I want to be needed and to feel competent.
• No, I don’t want to waste my time at work.

It can be incredibly annoying when it happens.

Fortunately, I learned how to deal with this situation and that bunch of needy folks over the years.

Fact Check: Why Are You Even in the Office?

Of course, context is everything.

Let me ringfence the scope of the question.

Why are you in the office, in the first place, if you are working as a,

• Sales professional?
• Pre-sales consultant?
• Customer Success Manager?
• Vendor Project Manager?
• Inside Sales Specialist?

You should be on the move!

If that sounds like me screaming and waving my arms crazily at you — That was the treatment given to me by my consulting mentor years ago.

This guy belongs to the stage. He is dramatic.

He is empathetic, too.

He listened to my woes. How I got dragged into meetings. How I was looped into discussions. He muttered nothing.

Until I was done.

And he said what I wrote a few lines back.

That was a lightbulb moment for me. It was that simple. I should not be in the office, at my hotdesk, in the first place!

I should be where my clients are.

Where my deals are.

Since then, that lesson stuck. I will only head back to the office once a week for internal meetings. I will stay near my clients for the rest of the week.

Opinion-Wise: The Pace of Life is Slower at Your Client’s Office

I know this sounds unbelievable. Hear me out.

Life is hectic for technology and software professionals. Time flies. We have a million things to take care of.

Take, for instance, the following.

• Meetings to assess the probability of million-dollar new deals.
• Quality assurance policies reviews and reinforcement.
• Proof-of-concept use case demonstration.
• Account profitability management.
• Prospect pipeline mining.

It turns the calmest mind into an anxious ape.

And you may wonder… aren’t different people hired to work on specific jobs? Unfortunately, not quite.

You see… technology or technology-based consulting firms are known to be flexible in their structure. Sounds nice, eh? That’s Morse code for structured chaos.

• You are a pre-sales consultant when I need one, especially when you happen to be eating bananas by the bench.
• You become the new bid manager when everyone else is busy with their deal assessments.

Life is incredibly challenging in the headquarters.

Life at your client’s office can be slightly tolerable.

They know,

• Their leaders have scheduled time to meet you.
• You don’t belong to their headcount.
• You have specific tasks to work on.

We can push back (within reasonable boundaries) when they try to dump all their work on us.

With our bosses? Tough luck.

Of course. That choice is yours.

Perspective-Piece: Fortify Your Calendar for a Peace of Mind

I wish someone taught me this during my analyst years.

Then, I was naïve. I thought I was looped into never-ending meetings because I was needed. That my thoughts are to be heard, that my opinions matter.

Well.

That’s that.

I learned (very quickly) that being the most junior within the 4 walls comes with undesirable consequences.

I had to,

• Take meeting minutes,
• Ping meeting attendees to come in,
• Check that all equipment and that wretched mike (actually) work.

I don’t know about you. I hated doing these things.

Being ranked on par with whale shit meant I had no power to press the decline button.

And so, I work to prevent those invitations from appearing on my calendar.

I would block all my golden thinking time slots the week before. Once that private meeting invitation becomes a fixture in my calendar, I know I have a guard working hard to bump away nonsensical invitations.

I would also make sure that I have lunches and dinners with clients and prospects. I would invite them for a meal first, and then drop them an invite.

That meeting invitation need not be elaborate.

“Client lunch” or “Client Dinner” is sufficient for pesky needy dudes to leave me alone.

In Parting

Everyone wants to do honest work.

We want to focus on tasks and achievements intrinsic to our roles. Occasional distractions are unavoidable.

All-day distractions with no sense of structure? No, thanks.

Our corporate forebears have devised creative ways to deal with unappreciated chaos.

Speak to them. Learn from them.

All my techniques here are inherited from my mentors.

The best part? They work.

And because they work, I can work.

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