In this episode of the Outrageous Workplace Stories podcast, host Speaker A introduces the series' mission to help listeners navigate challenging workplace dynamics while staying true to their humanity. The core of the episode is Natalie Fisher’s practical guide for dealing with managers who constantly shift priorities. She shares personal experience and client anecdotes, explaining how taking on every new request leads to unsustainable workloads and burnout. Fisher outlines a step‑by‑step approach: (1) recognize when the volume of work exceeds a realistic 40‑hour week; (2) quantify the time a new priority will require and explicitly ask the boss whether to re‑prioritize existing tasks; (3) propose alternative solutions such as hiring an agency, bringing in a contractor, or deferring less critical work; (4) engage in a collaborative conversation to agree on a prioritized order. She emphasizes that saying “yes” to everything hampers promotion prospects because it signals poor prioritization and an inability to set boundaries. Throughout, Fisher stresses the importance of acknowledging human capacity limits, framing the conversation as a partnership rather than a refusal, and using data‑driven language to protect against burnout while still delivering high‑quality work. The episode closes with a call to join the “Professionally Human” waitlist.
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Welcome to the Outrageous Workplace Stories series of the podcast. In these episodes, you'll see ways to handle even the toughest of workplace situations with power and impact while making humanity a priority. These stories shaped how I went from receptionist to HR manager in 4 short years without a degree, without the qualifications or experience that you would've thought I needed. This series is designed to help you turn everyday challenges into momentum for your next level, no matter where you're at right now. If staying grounded in your humanity and being true to who you are as a person is important to you, yet you also want to get to your next level, you want to earn more money, and you want to create a professional life you're proud of, that is also at the top of your list. I'm here to tell you that you can do both. And this is where you start.
What to do when you have a boss who keeps shifting priorities and every time it's something new and they're like, okay, now we gotta do this. Now we gotta do this. Now we gotta do this. I had a boss like this. I've had clients who've had bosses like this too. And it's tricky because when I first reacted, I was trying to do everything. I was like, okay, I'll get that done. I'll get that done. I'll get that done. Until it got to the point where it just felt like too much for one person. And then I had my coach take a look at the workload and she was like, yeah, that's Just too much for one person, and we needed to say something. I needed to say something, even though I was a low-ranking employee at the time and didn't really feel like I had the right to. I thought, no, I just have to suck it up. I just have to get this stuff done. However, when we realize that there's only 24 hours in the day, and even if we worked 24/7, we still wouldn't get all the work done in time, that's when it's time to say something. And even before then, because A lot of the times, even if you're working 40 hours a week, you have been given so much work to do that you couldn't possibly get it done in 40 hours. There, the priorities need to shift. Again, if you don't, it's risking burnout. It's gonna lead to nothing good. Nobody's gonna be happy in the end. It won't be sustainable. So here's how I learned to handle it. When a new priority came up, I wouldn't just take it and take notes and be like, okay, okay, and ask questions to get it done and move the focus there. Yet I would slow things down and I would say, Ask a question like, okay, just so you know, this new priority, by the sounds of it, is going to take about 10 hours from my time this week. Are you comfortable with me shifting from this, from the other thing that you had asked for? Are you comfortable with shifting these priorities onto this, or did you want us to move that to a later date? That way we're putting the, the ball back in her court and we're asking her, okay, how would you like me to manage these priorities? We can get all this done, but I am not going to be able to get it all done today. Kind of thing, right? And another thing that I could ask her, which I had, 'cause I had a toolbox of things that I would ask, because there are gonna be some bosses who are asking you to do ridiculous amounts of work or some companies that will just have too much for you to do. You could say, would you be open to another way of handling this? And you can suggest maybe that you hire an agency or that you have somebody else kind of over— you oversee the work, but that you have someone else do it. Like my clients have done that in many aspects. One of my clients was on a marketing team and she took over the marketing department and she was just dumped everything on the marketing department's plate. So that was, they wanted her to take over Facebook ads. They wanted her to do all the content. They wanted her to do all the analytics. They wanted her to manage every single platform. And they just thought, okay, this is our new hire. She's going to do all of it. And it wasn't realistic for her. And she had already, she already knew this when she, when she started, but she assumed that they would continue to have the Facebook marketing agency do the Facebook ads. She assumed assumed that they were going to continue to have the Google Analytics hire do that. But they thought that she was just going to take over all of it. So she had to have that conversation with them and say, look, it makes sense for me to take over a few of these things that need some improvement. But actually, these things that are in place are already doing really well. And we don't have a need for me to actually take them over because that's actually not my expertise. So there's option number 2, you can say, would you be open to another way of getting this done. And you can propose a solution if you have one, or if there's somebody maybe that you know, maybe you can bring in a contractor that you've worked with in the past, or you can find somebody else to help with it. Another idea is to say, yes, that is perfectly good. We will set that aside and we will tackle it once X, Y, and Z have been completed. What are your thoughts on that? 'Cause we wanna gauge like what they want, what they think is the most important thing. And get help from our manager or our boss to prioritize, but not automatically just take it all on. And that's the thing I see my clients doing, and I was doing, was just assuming that I had to take it all on. And sometimes you can take it on if it's a reasonable amount of work, but a lot of the times the person in charge is really disconnected from how much work there actually is to do. And it's often— if it's not possible in 40 hours a week, then you need to have that conversation. You need to bring it up. You need to state, you You know, this is going to take this many hours. This is going to take this many hours. This is not something I'm able to do within a week all by myself. If you'd like me to get that done, I will need some extra resources, or we will need to push this to the week after that. Which would you like to do? So we're working together with them. We're not essentially saying no. We're saying not right now, or another way, or let's have a let's open a suggestion, or let's have a compromise. But you're not just taking it all on because that's where the problem leads. That's where the problem starts. And again. Again, I enforce this in a couple of my videos now. The reason people don't get promoted that is never talked about is because they say yes to everything. No, it's because when you're saying yes to everything, it means one, you don't know how to prioritize and you're just trying to get it all done. Number two, you don't know how to have a difficult conversation about the fact that you can't do more than your human capacity worth of work in a certain amount of hours that you're paid. So you might be a top performer, you might be really good at what you do, but you are still constrained by the fact that you're a human. And that is okay, because your quality of output and your thoughtfulness and your thoroughness is going to be much better than ChatGPT. So we need that. We need to be able to have those conversations, even though they seem very risky. And we need to be able to ask for help prioritizing. You can even say like, this is how I would prioritize it. Am I on the same page as you? I would work on this first, this second, this third. What do you think? It's a collaborative discussion and make sure you're on the right page and also making sure that you're not taking on ridiculous amounts of work and never sleeping or working 60 hours. And I've helped many clients cut down their hours from 60 to 30 to 40 to reasonable amounts when they think they just have to keep taking the work and it's never going to end. That feeling is not sustainable. That's what I have for you, my friends. Talk to you soon.
If you enjoyed that story and you gleaned something from it, If you wanna learn how to master your professional life while being both impactful yet deeply human, join the waitlist for Professionally Human. The link is in the show notes. I can't wait for you to see what I have in store.
