Picture yourself at work and the day reaches 12pm. You think to yourself, “I am so busy, I don’t even have time for lunch! Shit, what do I need to do next?!”
Imagine yourself at work and the day reaches 5pm and you say to yourself “I still have so much to do, I’ll stay late?”
Remember that time you said to yourself, “I have too much work, but I can’t ask for help!”
Well, you’re not alone. Because there are thousands of people out there who face these issues every day. The reason for this is because in school we were never taught how to effectively manage our workload. We were piled on homework we didn’t want to do, have so much revision for tests which didn’t ask the questions that we revised for! On top of all that we didn’t know how to manage our work load. Frustrating right! So to help us all overcome these issues I explain below a simple way in which you can manage your daily work load.
Categorise and prioritise
There are different methods available to help you manage your workload. An effective way to do this, which I have found has worked for people at all levels of experience, is to categorise your tasks and then prioritise them. A great method for categorising tasks, as explained by Josh Kaufman in his book the Personal MBA, is to categorise your tasks into the following:
- Completion. This category is for tasks only you can complete. Everything else can be dealt in a different way.
- Deletion. If the task is unnecessary, wastes-time and not urgent, put it in the delete category.
- Delegation. This category is for tasks that your team can complete 80% as well as you can. For this you need to trust your team and delegate the task to the person you see best fit to complete it. Ensure you provide a clear expectation and realistic deadline. You will also need to accept that it won’t be 100% what you expect but can be tweaked.
- Deferment. This category is for tasks that are not critical but still need to be done. These can be put off until a later date to ease the workload pressure. A phrase used to describe this in U.K. construction is “a hospital job”.
See below my grid.
| Prioritising Grid | Urgent | Not urgent |
| Important | COMPLETE | DEFER |
| Not important | DELEGATE | DELETE |
Whilst categorising the task prioritise them into Important/ Not important and Urgent/ Not urgent.
Once you have categorised, prioritise tasks in each category. For example, prioritise your work as below:
COMPLETE
Task 1: The show stopper. If this isn’t done now all hell breaks loose.
Task 2: Very important. Needs to be done today.
Task 3: Important. Still needs to be done today.
DEFER
Task 4: Repetitive task (like chasing someone). Set reminder
Task 5: Important. Needs to be done this week.
DELEGATE
Task 6: Needs to be done ASAP but can be done by someone else.
Task 7: Needs to be done by COB tomorrow but can be done by someone else.
DELETE
Task 8: Pointless task. Delete.
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How to references this page
- Toor, J. (2019). How to manage your workload? Available: https://pmgrowth.co/how-to-manage-your-workload?
References
- Kaufman, J (2019). The Personal MBA. USA: Portfolio Penguin. 1-500.