Bought a $12 thank you card set for my boss and spent 40 hours on a skill that mattered zero
Everyone keeps saying to say yes to every task so you look eager, but I found out the hard way that this can backfire bad. About a year ago I was 6 months into a job in Denver and spent almost every Friday afternoon making these color coded slide decks for a weekly update nobody read. One Tuesday my manager pulled me aside and said point blank, "I don't know what you do all week." Turns out the guy who got promoted instead of me spent that same time learning our scheduling software and fixed a bug that saved the team 15 hours a week. Looking back I was chasing gold stars from the wrong people. Has anyone else had to pick between looking busy and doing stuff that actually counts, and how did you figure out which was which?
The "I don't know what you do all week" moment is brutal but it's the wake up call most of us need. What worked for me was asking my manager straight up what one thing would make their life easier, then dropping the busy work nobody noticed.