And failing strategies, stories are good.

What are your feelings on germ warfare?

Dude, just start "phoning it in." Oh, wait ...

Confront him.

You have to do this.

"I can't get anything domne with you looking over my shoulder nqd jogging mt elbow. If you want me to produce, give me some space."

It clears the air.

It's two women (me and her), which I do fear makes a difference. It doesn't make direct confrontation a bad idea, per se, but it's unlikely to result in good outcomes.

Asking for deadlines with your assignments sometimes works. And when you have two or more tasks competing for time, ask about prioritization.

You just learn to deal with it over time - the only strategy I can think of offhand is don't put the same effort into rough drafts that you used to, because guaranteed, but guaranteed, she will rewrite them 12 times. If she's like my old boss, she'll completely rewrite even the stuff that has already been proofed & rewritten, by her, three times. Even on the blueline. Even though it costs $$. Arrrghhh.

Eventually (and I worked for this psycho for five long years) you both come to a sort of compromise: you learn to bypass her whenever possible and she learns to turn a blind eye to the bypassing as long as it makes her look good. She calls this trust. Of course, then if you screw up you are, in fact, royally screwed, which, you have to understand, is probably the real, basic reason why she's a micromanager in the first place. Control freaks like to watch their subordinates tumble, because it reinforces their belief that noone else can do anything right, which means that they themselves will never fall down.

The danger here is that what happens is you yourself become less capable of taking initiative: when I moved on to a boss who was the polar opposite of a micromanager (he was crazy too, but in a different way) I floundered like hell because I just wasn't used to being allowed to do anything by myself and I'd gotten accustomed to the idea.

The danger here is that what happens is you yourself become less capable of taking initiative

Yes. Yes yes yes yes yes. I keep seeing this happening in other areas of my life and it's starting to worry me.

And eatitlive, heh. I was just asking for a deadline on a project, she gave me one, I said OK, then she shot back a "but I see no reason why it should take you so long; send me a list of all your projects and I'll tell you when and how to do each of them" email. WTF? If you want it earlier, tell me. If it doesn't matter, then it shouldn't matter what else I'm working on. Aaargh.

*SO* glad I'm going back to school....

I say fight micromanaging with microavoidance.

If she sent you an email saying "send me a list of all your projects and I'll tell you when and how to do each of them," respond by telling her "thanks for the offer, but I've got it under control. I'll have the other project to you on the agreed upon date."

I second mudpuppie. I have the worst possible kind of boss - a micromanager who is absent most of the time; he has no idea what the #(#(@! is going on most of the time, but wants to horn in on everything when he is here, and manages to screw it all up. My strategy is simply to withhold information from him. Most of the time he doesn't find out to begin with, and when he does, I'll bald-face lie and tell him that he and I had already discussed this, and he wanted it done this way, and it'll cost money to change, yadda yadda yadda, and most of the time he just surrenders.

I don't know if it works for everyone, but in my case I don't tell him ANYTHING. EVER.