[conductr]

I wish you luck but here are some things to keep in mind that you can do if you find yourself not into the therapist/self help stuff for whatever reason.

You can get better at knowing what they need vs what they ask for and push back in the form of raising concerns. Realize this is brainstorming and email/slack suck at this. Get in a room and draw what you’re going to build. Tell them why ask x won’t be useful/won’t work. Lastly, encourage a project manager type person to get involved even if informally. Your boss might be a good person for this if you have no one else. They can do the back and forth and some of what I said previously if you can’t. Also have some sort of project committee so only approved projects get your attention. Lastly, charge your cost to their budget. They won’t waste your time for long when it cost them a bonus assuming your company is setup that way. Get the finance guys involved. If there’s a culture of wasting time/resources they can help come up with a plan and they may own many of these ideas.

A lot of this assumes you’re at a bigger corporate company so YMMV.