Do you work in a fast paced environment?

I always hated the phrase"fast paced environment" in job a description because it usually meant that the company didn’t have enough employees and liked to overwork the few employees it did have. It also meant the company was delusional about its shortcomings because it advertised its “fast paced environment.” This isn’t always the case, but it’s what I think of when I see the phrase.

Regardless of whether this is a good thing or not, some of us have to deal with it. And I’m wondering here, how is it that you deal with it? Do you have some time management tips or tricks, or do you just fly by the seat of your pants and hope everything turns out alright?

Dead slow here. I’m on a 24x7 support team; each of the three shifts has five people on it so that they can have at least three people here on any given day. If one person calls in sick and the second has his car break down on the way to work, the third person can cover the job because there’s only one FTE worth of work to be done on an average day. Also, we have four people here two days a week, and all five of us are here on Thursdays in case we have a meeting or party (we never do). So, on those days, on average, there’s maybe an hour and a half’s worth of work to be done.

My main stressful thing I have to deal with is not smacking my co-workers for being so cluelessly, relentlessly right-wing. And bad at their jobs.

I don’t know if that is necessarily true. Some jobs, by their nature, are “fast paced” regardless of the number of employees. They may be intensely deadline driven or require immediate responsiveness to clients or other factors.

For example, years ago I worked for a consulting firm that mostly dealt with providing technology consulting to law firms and regulatory agencies. For the most part, we had plenty of employees. But the “fast paced” nature was driven by the fact that we were often hired to work on an ongoing case and there were typically immovable deadlines already established by the courts. This often resulted in periods of relative calm, punctuated by intense deadline driven client engagements requiring long hours of rapid, accurate work.

In contrast, when I left the firm to provide similar services as a manager of a “strategy” team in a large insurance company, it was the total opposite. People there used to require weeks just to perform the simplest task.

IME, a “fast-paced environment” is a concoction of the hiring manager or HR people to make it sound like the outfit is really busy and more important than they really are.

About the only legitamately fast-paced environments are 911 call centers, and even then, work is done at a deliberate and measured pace so the fire department isn’t dispatched to the wrong side of town.

Nope. In fact, we’re constantly being monitored to make sure we take our time, spend a full hour with each client, and we’re instituting technical enforcement (electronic sign in and sign out with a GPS location) because it’s so hard to get some of our nurses to slow the &%$# down and do their jobs.

Much of nursing can be fast paced, and sometimes it’s due to poor staffing and poor training, and sometimes it’s just the nature of the job. ER nursing can be pretty fast-paced for obvious reasons. As can Labor and Delivery and ICU, but when they are, no one’s having their best day ever. But home health is intentionally *not *fast paced, which is why I love it so; I like having a whole hour with one patient at a time with no call lights. It’s awesome.

Occasionally very fast paced, often not. Most businesses don’t staff for the busiest time. Too much wasted labor cost.

Local news.

Yup 85% of the time.

Nature of the beast.

Sometimes very fast. I work in an elementary school library. When the curiosity of enough kids has been piqued (sometimes by me) it can get crazy.

Shipping. Everything that comes in before 8pm has to be out the door and on its way to USPS by 9pm or a little after. In my shift (3-7) we can move about 84 packages per hour per person under the roof right down to the crew who sweep the floors - say 30k packages per shift. Which means about 150-170 packages an hour for us actually scanning and placing them. In our contract is a mandatory “flex-up” of up to an hour a day. Rare is the day we don’t flex up. Over that hour is voluntary but sometimes really needed.

Rare also is the day I don’t come home sweaty and tired - but in a good way if you know what I mean. I leave behind empty belts and with a sense that something got accomplished. How to handle it? I got used to just saying I work 3-9 and got the wife used to that schedule. If I actually get out at 7 I’m home “early”. Otherwise its just a normal day.

Same! It can be fast-paced and fun with multi-tasking the order of the day, but the internet is slow slow slow today. Very frustrating.

Yup. I work at 911 now. It can be sheer boredom punctuated by terrifying insanity.

The call center gets a call about a bad accident on the highway. A flood of 15 more calls come in, each reporting a bad accident. You had better be damned sure to interrogate each and every one to be sure they are talking about the same accident at the same location or else pick out which calls are referring to a different accident.

All the while you also need to sort out which police, fire, and ambulance units are attending which location. Be sure to get it right when sorting out which patients have which injuries, and so forth.

I have had jobs where I had to hump it every minute I was there. The most physicaly demanding was palitizing coffee beans. 10 trailer loads a day would equal about 1/2 million pounds of back breaking work. I didn’t consider that fast paced, just hard work.

  When I was 17 I was promoted from bus boy to grill chef in a steak house. My grill was about 8feet long with flames about 3 feet high and covered in steaks all having to be done different, all different kinds of steaks. I don't know how I did it. I know I would be literaly drenched in sweat when the dinner rush was over.

Sometimes “fast-paced” is in the eye of the beholder.

I work evenings. We have six machines. Day shift has six guys, we have three. Depending on what’s going on, we’ll work two or sometimes three machines.

Day shift people are always saying they don’t know how we can stand it, constantly running from machine to machine and blah blah blah.

But that isn’t how we work. On my very first day I was told by the general manager, the shift supervisor, and my lead guy, to do one thing at a time, take my time and make sure I’d done it right, and then move to the next thing, even if it meant having another machine sit idle while I took care of something.

So day shift looks at us and sees us moving between two and three machines and thinks it must be horrendously stressful because they’re used to standing in one place all day–and we look at them and can’t imagine how they can tolerate something as boring as running only one machine.

I worked in much the same environment - computer forensics primarily for law firms and bankruptcy cases, and like you say, it was feast or famine; except that the feast times were just horrific- 16 hour days weren’t uncommon, fuck weekends, and a good chunk of the time, this was working in some crappy conference room at the client’s site (not necessarily the law firm’s office, but where the data was).

I freaking hated it; my current job is more classic IT, and it’s pretty much a 8-5 job, with occasional weekend work. I’m not on-call, being a BA/product manager, so when I do have weekend work, I’m in charge of scheduling it, so it’s rarely all that onerous.

This except I’m the lawyer.

In building maintenance it can be when a fire alarm goes off, a toilet overflows, the roof leaks, or the lights go out. In equipment maintenance when we have a rush job to get out it gets hectic when something breaks down and some idiot manager is looking for someone to blame going “who broke it?” when in truth sometimes machines just break.

No, not faced paced day by day.

Yes faced paced over the course of time. Work in software consulting. The software is constantly changing, improving, upgraded along with peripheral products. Keeping up with it all in the course of a year yes is faced paced.

When I hear “fast-paced environment,” a restaurant kitchen comes to mind.

It depends on where we are in the software development/update process, and how big anything we’re working on is.

On Friday I had a deadline that had me working until 9 pm, but next week will be fairly quiet while our vendor works on what we’ve sent them. Once they return things to us, it will get busy again.

Sometimes. Most of my various jobs are deadline-driven and no one cares whether I turn things in at 5pm Tuesday or 3am Thursday, as long as it’s before the thing is needed. That’s nice and calm.

Occasionally, I stage manage or handle wardrobe for runway or theater. It doesn’t matter how long you have to get twelve women into multi-piece showcase ball gowns with full hair and makeup; they’re all dressing at once, so you’re going to be sprinting around whether you like it or not. Double the challenge if you’re in the show yourself, and have to get ready at the same time. :eek: