What to do when I've been told a few times that I'm going to be assigned a task and nothing happens?

Question

It's happened a few times that my supervisor or my boss has told me that there's something that they're going to assign to me but nothing happens. For one of them, my boss said that the prerequisites were not ready yet. But I have no idea what the reasons were for the others.

I'd like to know what the best way is to follow up with them about those tasks. I don't know what politics to use when asking them that what happened to that X task that I was supposed to do; so that they don't think that I'm going to judge their weak schedule or question their wrong information. On the other hand, I'm afraid if I don't ask anything they'll think that I'm not interested in doing tasks and prefer to be idle at work.

To clarify my question I need to add that my role is DB report writer. So I need to wait for a report to be requested by some other departments to do that. Besides, the prerequisites also should be prepared by other departments. I have told my boss that I have sometime among my reports to do something else but he had no idea what to assign to me. I have defined a project for myself and told my boss that I'm going to investigate on something to see if that helps part of their job.

Answer 1

Just ask them. Say you've discussed the task recently, and prompt whether they have more clarity of the prerequisites now. Tell them the time you are available to start working on the task, and if you currently have nothing to do, ask what your priority should be. Just be polite, stress your interest in doing the tasks, not the fact you've discussed it multiple times.

A good boss isn't going to read judgement into this. It will actually be a good thing that you are being proactive. Your supervisor may have a lot of tasks on their hand, and have simply forgotten about yours, or hasn't really had the time to revise them and get back to you. It's important that you don't just sit around doing nothing unless told to.

In any case, don't stay idle. Pick up something that can help your team or company. If you are in a team, you can ask your team mates for tasks you can help them with. Depending on your industry, there may be a number of maintenance or housekeeping tasks. For example in software there could always be writing more unit tests, reducing technical debt, writing documentation, clearing out old tickets from your bug tracking system, etc.

Especially if you are new in the company, let your supervisor (and team, if it affects them) know what you are doing so no effort is duplicated or wasted. You can tell them you are waiting for them to prepare the requirements for your task, and that in the meanwhile, you suggest that you do this and that task that colleague A and B told you about.