A question for those who do clerical work.

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As some of you on here already know I have been working in retail for the past 6 years since the diagnosis and have had a considerable amount of success.

I learned that in order for me to hold down a job I had to learn to ask certain question such as: How many tasks do I have to accomplish with in a given 6-8 hour work day. Also how many minutes should it take me to accomplish each task.

Now I have a new goal: Making the transition to government clerical work. Now there are a couple of you on this website who have communicated to me that you do work in clerical positions for the government.


My question is this: For those of you who are involved with clerical work in either government or the private sector what are some questions that you ask or techniques that you use to make sure that your work gets accomplished ON TIME in a given work day?!

Depending on the organisation, or even on the branch within, not too much will be expected of you straight away.
Typically you may have to sit with someone to learn their role, and have some one on one training.
If this is the case, either make sure you take notes, or ask for a copy of any notes there are that explain the process, that way you won't be going back every five minutes for clarification once you start going on your own.

I always struggled in my various roles - I was with a govt department for 6 years, and switched branches 5 times; I had not been diagnosed at the time, if I had, it probably would have been best to have disclosed it.

No matter who tells you differently, from the supervisor, to the manager, to the secretary or director, or whoever is in charge, quality is ALWAYS more important than quantity.
You will find there are some people that leave others in awe, as they process 2 - 3 times more than everyone else.
These people are the people that constantly make mistakes, but due to the volumes that they process this gets overlooked, until something really major goes wrong.
When you have people like this working with you, it gives a false sense of achievable productivity, and you will find the supervisor or manager cracking the whip to improve efficiency.
You must either ignore this, or bring your concerns about this to attention, otherwise you are at risk of looking slow, or worse, you will try to speed up and make lots of mistakes yourself.

I would say, learn the task, learn how best to do it efficiently, effectively and accurately, and then discuss with your supervisor.
Better to be 85% as productive as the average with no mistakes, than to be 100% on time speed wise with 25% mistakes.
This is where your autism is useful to you, and you should make the most of it.
You will notice discrepancies, mistakes, errors, or inaccuracies that others will not notice, and you will be able to address them, bring to the appropriate person's attention, or otherwise flag them for action. NT's typically will turn a blind eye, and create more problems down the track, whilst looking effective and efficient, and most of them either won't even realise what they've done, or will justify it by saying they're working quickly like they were asked to, and that this is just collateral damage.

Once you know what you can do, how you can do it, and how accurate you are, you can time yourself or ask to be timed by a supervisor.
That can help set your baseline, but even then, every day is different (even though it can feel like Groundhog day sometimes), and events, your mood, and the complexity of the work can vary from one file or case to another, so you will never have a definitive goal that you will reliably be able to achieve.
Also you should flag that you will need a sense of completion and closure at the end of each day.
In some of my roles, I had to put files in a drawer and come back to them the next day, after the weekend, or sometimes even a week later.
This caused me no end of stress, loss of sleep, and in the end contributed to my decision to leave.