Is my work handed to me or do I pick it up?

I once saw a manager who recently lost their administrator to a company layoff go inside the person's abandoned cubicle and start picking up sticky notes that she had provided the admin with and then saying, 'i have no idea if any of this work got done'. In this situation, the manager was handing work to the admin; the admin was not empowered to collect or pick up their work.

Have you ever hand someone hand you something at an inopportune time? It can be awkward and annoying. When you travel to see family or friends and someone gives you an awkward gift or returns something they borrowed and says, 'it's time for me to give you back the weight bench and car stands I borrowed from you'. You think to yourself, I flew out here with carry on luggage - this is kind of annoying.

Whatever the different cases maybe, there is an element of efficiency and empowerment when you let people pick up their own work. Particularly if you're using a system or process that can establish some sort of ownership during the pick up process. If people are allowed to have two queues, you can learn a lot about the work load and the work day without bothering them. One queue being these are the items that I've 'picked up' and I'm working on them. The initial pile being these are items that are waiting for me to get to them. In either case, an element of aging can be leveraged in your working with any process or work flow that would allow for tracking of how old something might be.

When you have two queues, colleagues can jump in and help with items in the first queue that you haven't touched yet. If you don't have two queues, a well intentioned person trying to help could easily do more harm than good.

Going back to the empowerment or lack of empowerment of the different options. If I have to go to work everyday and know that I'll be working on whatever is handed to me that day, the uncertainty could be someone unsettling. Even at the most basic levels of work in any company if you can give someone a 24 window to execute their work with some independence to plan and prioritize I would suggest that the job satisfaction would go up significantly.