About a year ago one of my colleagues quit her job due to stress. She told me our workplace was too stressful, and while I'm sure there were other reasons this appears to be the main one.
I was given the vast majority of her personal workload, which she would generally complete in about 10 hours through the week. (Generally the team has to work on all tasks collectively, but will be given some direct responsibilities and a few hours weekly away from the team to work on these alone.)
On top of her responsibilities, over the past few months I've been additional personal responsibilities, with different levels of priority. However, I have only been given 2 hours weekly to address these tasks.
I don't have an issue with this in the sense that I will prioritise and work on the more urgent items first and if secondary items don't get completed they get moved to next week. However, today (and not for the first time) my boss picked out one of these secondary tasks, and started pointing out all the things I hadn't done. He finished up by saying 'I miss Former Colleague.'
Not my most professional moment but I said to him 'you do realise she got hours and hours each week to do her work?'
The conversation was interrupted, but I'm now wondering how to tackle the situation. I can't work on secondary tasks over priority and my workplace is very clear on what constitutes priority. It's not as simple as asking for another few hours because we are short staffed on our team tasks, and most of those have the highest priority of all.
Should I still try to request more hours for personal tasks? Should I continue as I am? Should I approach my boss and remind him (professionally this time) of the excessive time constraints I'm under to complete tasks?
