Too many projects, too little time, how to cope?
by Andrew on 08/01/09 at 11:00 pm
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Your workplace probably doesn’t feel like this:
It’s more like this:
A hundred things screaming for your attention every minute of every day. And thanks to the wonders of Blackberries, 3G, laptops and cellphones, they scream every minute of every night and weekend as well.
Right now you’re reading this, but you know you should be working on the 2009 marketing plan, going through CV’s for the new admin assistant, working out which suppliers absolutely have to be paid today, and kicking yourself that you’ve left your personal tax return to the last day. So what do you do? You check your e-mail…
[There are] people whose very agenda is set by their in-box. In other words, they show up at work without a clear agenda of what their goals and objectives are for that day. Instead, they immediately open their e-mail program and go to work. Whatever is in there is their work. They scan it, answer some, and skip others, with little or no plan based on anything objective or purposeful. Some answer or work on the ones that are simple or that make them feel good, and they avoid the others that are more difficult or produce anxiety. The point is that e-mail is in control of the person’s agenda, instead of his or her own purposes driving it.
(Dr Henry Cloud, in “The One-Life Solution“)
When I read that it hit me how much anxiety my daily todo list causes me, and how I hide behind the “urgent” e-mails which take my mind off the bigger stuff, without actually making any progress. This is explored in great detail in Stephen Covey’s classic, “The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People“, but you don’t need all the theory to put it in to practice today. Here is what I’ve started doing on a Monday morning:
- I make a list of the 4 or 5 major projects/tasks that are important, and need to keep moving forward this week. These are the “rocks” that I want to put in first, and let the “pebbles” of life fill in around them (another Covey-ism which you can read about here).
- I open my Outlook Calendar and estimate the amount of time there is in the week that hasn’t been pre-booked by meetings, time off etc. A totally “clean” week would have a base of about 40 working hours. I divide that time in half to get the allocation for my “rocks”, so 20 hours in a clean week.
- I split this 20 hour allocation amongst the rocks, according to their priority, so one might get 6 hours while another gets 2.
- I create chunks of time between 1 and 2 hours for each rock, adding up to their allocation, and drop them into my Outlook calendar for the week. I leave healthy gaps between each chunk for the pebbles of life to fall into.
The result is something like this:
Monday morning is fairly free so that I can plan the week and clear out stuff that has collected since Friday. In this week Tuesday was a holiday, so that was blanked out. I had a lunch meeting on Monday, but the rest of the week was fairly free for rocks, which are the coloured blocks.
Of course, this only works if you have the discipline to stick with the plan, which is another thing that Henry Cloud addresses:
Let’s say you have an important meeting for one of your most important projects. But, instead of closing the door to the conference room and putting the ‘meeting in progress’ sign on the door, you have it open and throughout the meeting a dozen people walk in, walk up to you, and begin a conversation. You stop interacting with the people around the table and change the agenda to whatever the new one who walked in wants to talk about. When that conversation is over, you being to turn back to your meeting and pick up where you left off.
The only way to start a 2-hour chunk of “rock” work is to shut down your e-mail program (or turn off the auto send/receive), instant messaging, Twitter, your phones and close the office door. If your wife suddenly goes into labour someone will burst through the door and tell you, but other than that the world can wait. It waits when you’re in the boardroom in an important client meeting, so why can’t it wait when you’re working on a task?
Once the hour or two is over you can hit send/receive, return phonecalls, deal with emergencies, read a few blogs, and handle all the little tasks that usually take up your whole day. By “batching” these things together you’ll get them done more efficiently, and you’ll be surprised at how many little fires somehow put themselves out while your door was closed. It’s important to leave big enough gaps in your day for all this other work to happen, because if you’re not realistic about it you’ll start eating into the rock time and the whole thing will fall apart.
Something that took me be surprise was the liberation I experienced by setting targets on the number of hours I would allocate to projects, rather than saying “finish X and Y this week”. How often have you started a Monday with the guilt of all the missed goals from the previous week? We normally under-estimate how long each task will take, and over-estimate how much time we will manage to give to it during the week. Repeatedly missing targets means you scrap the whole system and return to crisis mode.
It’s much easier to achieve a goal of “spend 4 hours on X this week”, rather than “finish X this week”. You’ll feel great about achieving everything you aim to achieve, and that the wheels are turning on all of your important projects, many of which don’t have deadlines and so are continuously getting bumped.
But what if something really does need to get finished by a certain date, like a client deliverable? Well, if the world will fall apart if the deadline isn’t reached, you’ll probably make a plan to get it done. You’ll use some of the in-between time instead of reading blogs, or you’ll stay late or pull an all-nighter. But at least all the other projects will keep moving.
It’s not always possible to know on a Monday exactly how your week is going to pan out, but you’ve got the flexibility to drag things around on your calendar and reset priorities. The important thing is that your start the week, and each day, with an agenda of sorts.
I’ll leave you with two questions from Cloud’s book:
- Who is in charge of your agenda, or what you work on – you or your inbox?
- Who is in charge of your time, or when you do what – you or your e-mail?
Happy planning!
Andrew Smith is the pedantic systems guy behind Live Alchemy, a SA e-commerce company. Andrew writes for Ideate in an attempt to make the world a more efficient place. View more articles by Andrew.
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