“The key is not to prioritize what's on your schedule, but to schedule your priorities” – Stephen Covey

At some point any parent will undoubtedly have been asked:

Are we there yet?

When will dinner be ready?

It’s apparent from an early age we want clarity. Young children often struggle to comprehend when there isn’t alignment between their expectations and the response. Whereas, adults are better at understanding this.

What I notice with workers who don’t have a good handle on their workload (backlog, current and planned work) is they lack clarity. Left unchecked it can extend to frustration and overwhelm.

Workers like this have varying methods in managing tasks and actions that have varying levels of success. Examples include:

Unactioned emails or those waiting on a response from someone else are kept in the inbox – people who do this typically relay on memory to frequently scan down their inbox to ensure they haven’t missed forgotten anything
A To-Do List – that keeps growing and becomes a wish list
Reminder flags added to emails – it sort of works until there are too many reminder flags which don’t distinguish priority
Emails snoozed – it doesn’t determine priority and can encourage procrastination

I like my schedule to be a complete view of my daily commitments – internal and external meetings I need to attend, work I must action and strategic initiatives I need to work on.

By this complete view, I’m able to quickly change the schedule if I need to but assess the impact of taking on more work – do I have the time or what needs to be pushed out? This assessment is easy and can usually be done within 30 seconds.

In our jobs, we get new demands placed on us all the time. Those who don’t have a good system in place will either have to recalculate the impact in their head, say they can’t do it as a standard response, agree they can but then miss the deadline or become overwhelmed when the realisation strikes that they’re behind again.