It’ll be done on Friday

I had an employee once that would tell me “It’ll be done on Friday.” He would tell me this for every task on any day all year long. I was a young supervisor and felt bad for him in some ways. He was a nice guy but seemed to have it rough, had fallen out of luck in love, life, and work.

But, he procrastinated. Or maybe he just couldn’t do the work and didn’t want to tell me. I don’t know but it almost ruined my ERP environment.

I let it go, waiting for Friday to come. It never did and the work was never completed. I eventually had to go through the disciplinary process, up to and including termination.

All I can say is stop it early if you see it happen. Today I have another employee who isn’t productive and tells me that he is working on things when he isn’t. He will never be assigned to an important project until the behavior changes. We will put systems in place to manage tasks for now and I will work with him to change the behavior until I can’t.

This is a useful site that I just found while reading about this topic. It has some guidelines around what the employee and yourself can do as a project manager.

https://solvingprocrastination.com/workplace-procrastination/