Sometimes the issue is important sometimes, who cares
Being an IT manager is much different than being on an IT staff, unless of course, like me you are the IT staff. Sure the role of manager gets some benefits, like pay or sometimes delegation to employees, but overall many of the ‘perks’ are more work than perk.
I was reading a blog post recently about not caring about some things. The post outlined a philosophy of not caring and pointed out that this is ok in some cases. We all have things we do not care about and others around us will not care about some things that are seemingly near and dear to us or cause us worry.
This hit home for me in terms of IT management because some fires, no matter who they are for are just not that important.
A document has a bad font in the header and gets printed. The individual printing the document runs over to the help desk and announces their worry about the font issue complaining that it needs to be corrected.
Does the document go to a customer? Or is the document getting filed for later (or never again) viewing by someone here?
If the document goes to the customer it should be fixed (unless it is known perhaps that the customer doesn’t care) and if it is going to a box in the recesses of an underground bunker never to be seen again, who cares what the header looks like.
While this philosophy cannot be forced on others, like the employee running over with the problem, simply showing that you do not care may get the problem resolved. You’ll likely have to explain why you don’t care and show that the fix is unnecessary and may well end up fixing it anyway, but the not caring stance may make the whole process less stressful. If you do not care about the issue, it doesn’t matter either way the outcome, so you needn’t worry about doing it or not doing it.
This isn’t intended as a way to get out of work, but to look at the things you get asked objectively rather than subjectively. These things shouldn’t cause you worry and loss of sleep because you do not care about them, certainly not the opposite tons of worry and sleeplessness because you didn’t get to the task.
