If you feel like your boss has been piling more tasks on you or that you keep being asked to do more with less, you’re probably onto something. Since the financial crisis, employers have pushed employees to be more productive. Today’s jobs report will also give us some new data on how productive we were in December.

President Obama’s basically told Congress he doesn’t need it. He filled top slots at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and the National Labor Relations Board without Congressional approval yesterday. And now he’s planning to use executive orders to push through parts of his jobs plan.

There was, hard though it may be to believe, some economic data out today. Something called the Purchasing Managers Index, or PMI, for December — a sense of how manufacturing’s doing around the world. How fast goods are being made, and delivered, among other things. Looking at that and some other indicators, Marketplace’s David Gura says the news ain’t all bad.

Now to the big news from North Korea. Leader Kim Jong-Il has died of a heart attack. He’s being succeeded by his son, Kim Jong-Un. For almost two decades, the elder Kim kept the country — and its economy — isolated.

Today, in Washington, D.C., lawmakers are back at work — which is different than saying they’re actually getting work done. House Republicans have decided not to go along with a bipartisan payroll tax cut bill approved by the Senate over the weekend.

There is — and this is kind of an understatement — a whole lotta data about the economy. Some we pay attention to. Some we don’t. We usually put the weekly unemployment report — the number of Americans who made their first claims for unemployment benefits — in the don’t pile, because that number comes out weekly and measuring the American economy on a weekly basis is tricky.

But we break with that tradition today.

It’s Wednesday, the 14th of December, which means there are just 10 shopping days till Christmas, 17 days till the end of the year and something like 48 hours until the government runs out of money.

Again.

I know. We’ve been here before. But it does seem like this time the threat of a government shutdown just kind of snuck up on us. It’s just the first in a rolling series of time limits Congress is facing as it tries to wrap things up for the year. And we know how lawmakers love deadlines.

The big political disagreements we’re having here over the economy and what to do about it? Whether to cut spending or spend more and hope there’s growth? They’re doing the same thing over there: Austerity on one hand, or stimulus on the other.

Republicans in the Senate have blocked the nomination of Richard Cordray, President Obama’s pick to head the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. That’s the latest setback for the Dodd-Frank financial reform law. Now President Obama says he is considering a recess appointment.

Today, the United States Postal Service laid out the cost-cutting plan pretty much everyone knew was coming. The post office is about this close to bankruptcy, so it wants to close more than 200 mail-processing facilities across the country. It wants to do away with next-day delivery of first-class mail. And it wants to lay off 30,000 people, provided it can convince regulators to let it do that. In all, it would amount to about $3 billion in savings.

But with e-mail and online banking all the other trimmings of digital life, what’s the hope for snail mail, anyway?

With leaders in Europe trying to find their way out of an economic crisis, there continues to be concern about how a European recession could affect us here in the United States.

Consumer confidence was up last month. That’s the economic statistic of this Tuesday. People are apparently less worried about keeping their jobs and more optimistic about the economy than they have been.

The one catch is that the survey period was only through Nov. 15th — that is, before the budget-cutting super committee revealed itself to be less than all that super.

But what if I told you that there’s a way to cut the deficit by as much as $7 trillion over the next 10 years? That’s way more than the $1.2 trillion the super committee was supposed to cut. And the best part? Congress wouldn’t have to do much at all. Anything, really.

Joining the tax cut extension in the pile of things left undone at year’s end is AT&T’s hopes for merger with T-Mobile. It would have been a $39 billion deal, but for AT&T walking away yesterday in the face of Justice Department opposition.

AT&T was so confident this thing would go through, that it promised a $3 billion breakup fee to T-Mobile’s parent company Deutsche Telekom if it all went kerflooey. They spent millions of dollars on ads and lobbyists trying to make its case that this deal would be good for consumers and the U.S. economy.

So, given they had that kind of confidence going in, why didn’t AT&T prevail?

President Obama is on his way to Cleveland today, where he’s scheduled to give a speech on the economy. He’s traveling with Ohio’s former attorney general, Richard Cordray. The president plans to use a recess appointment to name Cordray as head of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.