So you’ve read the books, taken the courses and know exactly what to do. Yet, you’re still overwhelmed; your to-do list is a mountain, and you have no idea where to begin.
This week, We’re looking at using what you already know to finally build a system that keeps you on track with what’s important.
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Script | 440
Hello, and welcome to episode 440 of the Your Time, Your Way Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development, and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein, and I am your host of this show.
In my Productivity Academy, when a new member joins, they are invited to complete a short questionnaire about where they currently are, where they are stuck and what they ultimately want their overall system to do for them.
Once I receive the answers, I go through them and then send them a personalised learning roadmap that will, all being well, put them back in control and help them develop a system that works for the way they work.
We are all different. We think differently and have different responsibilities both professionally and personally. There isn’t a one-size-fits-all system. How we manage our work and life needs to fit the way we think, how we like to organise things, and the roles we have.
There isn’t a magic pill or a quick fix for most people. Time management and productivity skills are not usually at the top of a professional’s list of skills to learn.
But those skills are still important. When you know how to manage your day, are able to quickly identify what is important and what is not, and organise your work so you can find what you need when you need it, you can remove a lot of stress and daily decision-making.
So, with that said, let me hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question.
This week’s question comes from John. John asks, Hi Carl, what advice would you give to someone who is completely swamped with work? I’ve tried everything, but nothing ever sticks, and I’m exhausted from trying all these new ideas and still being swamped.
Hi John, thank you for your question, and I’m sorry you feel so swamped. Let’s see if we can unpick a few things and help you.
One of the first places to look at when you are feeling swamped is the work coming in versus the work going out.
What I mean by this is that if more work is coming in than is going out, that would likely indicate a capacity problem. You’re being asked to do more work than is possible to do in the time that you have.
At the same time, you’ll be building backlogs, which compound the problem.
However, it could mean that there may be a process problem. Let me explain.
If one of your responsibilities was to write and submit proposals to clients, and each proposal takes, on average, two hours to write when you are not being interrupted, but you are frequently interrupted by colleagues, bosses and clients chasing you, it will take you longer to write the proposals because there’s no boundary in your system.
If you were to look at this from above, if you need two hours to write a proposal, you attend, on average, one meeting a day, and you keep an hour back to deal with emergencies and communications, trying to complete three proposals a day would be a squeeze.
Then if you’re having to fend off interruptions when you are working on the proposals, the chances are you won’t be able to do three, more likely two and a bit.
But if you’re measuring your performance by delivering 15 proposals a week, that’d be a challenge.
One of the first places I would look at is the process of generating proposals. Are there any ways this could be sped up? What steps often cause delays or slow things down?
It could be that the sales team often send you incomplete proposal requests, which means you need to chase them up for additional information, or, and I’ve seen this numerous times with clients, there’s a system that allows for some proposals or pieces of work to be marked urgent.
If there are no guidelines for marking something as urgent, it’s not long before everyone is marking their work as urgent.
The second place I would look at is the disruptions that occur when you are doing your most important work.
Now, this assumes that you do try to block time for doing the most important work each day. If you’re not doing so, you leave yourself open to being interrupted at the most inconvenient of times.
Now, I know there are some who will resist the idea of protecting time for uninterrupted work. They feel, rightly or wrongly, that they must be available all day, just in case.
Sometimes, this can work, but it depends on the kind of work you do. A salesperson will likely find it advantageous to be available for their customers. Whereas a graphic designer or copywriter may find this a disadvantage, as the nature of their work requires some quiet time each day to do their work.
I’m a writer. Some of my work has deadlines; other parts don’t. But what I do is protect 9:30 to 11:30 am each day for quiet, uninterrupted work. I’ve found over the years that as long as I have that time protected, I can generally get all my important work done by the end of the week.
And because it’s a consistent time, my team, my wife and even Louis, my dog, all know that between those times, I am not available unless it’s a genuine emergency.
Now, I understand that not all of you will be able to dedicate a consistent time to doing your most important work, but it’s worth trying because after a relatively short time, everyone you work with learns your routines, and you will likely find that your colleagues start respecting your time more.
Okay, so those ideas are for solving the work swamp longer term. How do you get back in control now?
It will depend on the work you do, of course, but one of the first things you can do is to put a temporary stop on new work coming in.
And as I say those words, I can hear a collective sharp intake of breath: “Is he really telling us to stop all new work coming in?!”
Yes, I am.
Hear me out. If more work is coming in than you can deliver, not stopping new work coming in only makes things worse. There needs to be a break so you can get on top of your backlogged work.
But the advantage of asking for a temporary stop of new work coming in is that it alerts the people who are sending you work that there’s a bottleneck.
This often triggers assistance and can alert your bosses that your workload is nearing capacity, and they either need to assign you help or find ways to reduce your workload.
This is not likely to be your fault. Work often increases organically. When we first start doing a new job, we’re learning how to do the work, and as we gain experience, we speed up. We can take on more and do it faster.
But there’s still a limit. You might start out doing three or four pieces of work each day; as you gain experience, that may increase to seven or eight. But soon, no matter how good and fast you are at doing your job, you will reach a ceiling. Everyone has a capacity.
At a push, I can write around 4,000 words per day. But I wouldn’t be able to do much of anything else, and it’s unlikely I would be able to respond to my emails or messages.
If a publisher came to me and asked for a 5,000-word article by tomorrow, I’d have to turn them down or negotiate the deadline. The money might be great, but I can’t alter the time or my ability to write that many words to the standard that would be expected.
I remember when I was selling new cars. When I first started, it was the salesperson’s responsibility to deliver the car. This meant that we needed to locate the car, arrange for it to be delivered to the dealership, get it through its PDI (pre-delivery inspection), and have it valeted.
This meant dealing with the service and valeting departments and ensuring that everything lined up for the agreed handover day.
This meant the more cars I sold, the less time I had for selling cars. My workload increased each time I sold a car. Particularly when you took into account that it was also the salesperson’s responsibility to ensure that any finance arrangements were completed and the documentation ready for signing.
It soon became clear that if I sold more than 8 cars a week, I would not be able to do my job properly. There would be no time for me to prepare the cars for delivery and keep selling.
It wasn’t long before the sales managers recognised this as a problem, and they hired a specialist to deal with the post-sales arrangements.
Now my sales colleagues and I were able to increase the number of cars we could sell each week.
So, John, what is your current capacity? If you’re not sure, it’s worth finding out.
The final tip I would give you is to step back and think about what your important work is. This does not mean what is “urgent”. Urgent work can be both important and urgent, but often it’s not.
If you were to identify what your important work is, you then have a way of pre-deciding what you will work on. This not only helps you to reduce the number of decisions you need to make each day, it also helps you to choose where to start.
If you’re already swamped, you could divide the work up into genuinely important work and the not-so-important.
A proposal for a $5 million contract is likely to be more important than one for a $5,000 contract. No matter how loud and persistent the person wanting you to write the $5,000 contract is.
It’s fascinating to track how much time we lose each day trying to decide what we should work on first. When I did this a few years ago, I found I lost nearly 90 minutes each day just trying to figure out what to work on next.
And because I was looking at a long list of things to do, I invariably picked the easiest: reply to this message or that email.
I tried to convince myself that if I reduced the list of things to do, I would have time later in the day to do the harder, more important things. Ha! That never happened. By the time the list was reduced, I was exhausted and sitting down late in the afternoon to do a difficult piece of work, rarely happened.
I soon learned to do the hardest thing in the morning when I was fresh and leave the less important things for the afternoon.
I should add, it also helps if you identify what the important work is the evening before. Then write it down somewhere where you will see it when you arrive back at work the next day.
Unless a genuine emergency occurred between leaving work and returning the next day that changes things, you start with that pre-decided piece of work.
I knew this morning when I arrived that this podcast script needed to be written before anything else got done. And… It did.
Thank you, John, for your question. I hope this has helped and given you some ideas.
And thank you to you too for listening.
If you’d like to explore what else you get beyond a personalised learning roadmap in my Productivity Academy, and there is a lot, you can learn more by clicking the link in the show notes.
It just remains for me now to wish you all a very, very productive week.