Saying No At Work

Working as a W2 employee at a demanding job is a pain in the ass, especially when there's no one to offload the work to when it piles up. The best way to deal with this phenomenon is to have a list of things that you're working on, keep track of how long everything takes you and tell your boss: I'm working from the top of the list down. If something is more important tell your boss to put it at the top of the list and you'll switch to doing that but the list is the list and if your boss wants to pile things on at the last minute you can tell him to put it at the top of the list but the list is what you're working on and you're going to ignore everything else. It's a bit like how job scheduling in a computer works. There are 100 things to do every once and a while a scheduler figures out the order they should be attended to and they are given their particular time slice. Of course switching projects constantly doesn't help productivity so the analogy isn't perfect.