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I'm curious about what people think of a "second-request" kind of strategy I have at work: Sometimes when I get asked to do something I feel is unreasonable, u

I'm curious about what people think of a "second-request" kind of strategy I have at work: Sometimes when I get asked to do something I feel is unreasonable, unwarranted, or unnecessary (and it's not something like, there's a fire in the conference room and I'm trapped, please help), I'll totally ignore it, but if they ask a second time, I'll just do it. Very often they either forget, or just do it themselves before coming back, confirming that it was either unnecessary or they didn't need me to do the thing in the first place. If they do come back, it's easy to come into the plausible deniability and "Oh sorry I forgot! I'm on it." And then maybe guilt them with "I was caught up in ${task that actually is part of my job}."

toast0 6y ago
That strategy worked well for me, although I wasn't actually trying to ignore the requests. I just got a lot of requests and wasn't organized about them, so some things fell through the cracks. That said, I would push back on things that I was definitely not going to do. For some things, that's person A can do this; for others that's if you can find someone to do this, ok; for some it's I'm not going to do this unless my manager or the CEO personally asks me to; for others it's I won't do this, and I won't deploy it, and I'll unmerge it if it's done by someone else. And always try to give people an idea of when to remind me if I haven't done it.