How to stop the flow of incoming tasks and establish order in the affairs
Productivity / / December 23, 2019
A few days ago, with an acquaintance, a talk on the topic of management workloads. He asked the question - "Every day I received tasks more than I can accomplish. The number of pending tasks of all increases and increases and chaos increases. How to stop it? "The question is relevant to many. Many are familiar with the feeling of helplessness experienced by people under the onslaught of incoming tasks and ever increasing, to-do list. Here are 5 steps to get out of the chaos.
Council №1 - Just stop ...
1. or rather... Stop the incoming stream. In order to understand the working mechanism, it is necessary to start to stop. You will not be able to fix the problem as long as they continue to come to you a torrent. So stop the flow. Do not accept new tasks and take a break. This stop will not only allow you to easily disassemble the current list but also to focus only on this. In general, Board Room 1 - Collect all the tasks in one list, and do not take the new yet not put things on the list. Note - do list is "right" when you know all you need to do is feel some control and pleased with themselves. The last point is the most important. It is not joke. You need to regain a sense of satisfaction.
And understand - the world will not collapse and the company will not collapse if you withdrew for a couple of days.
2. Rate time costs. The next thing to do is to estimate how long it will take for each task. High accuracy of the assessment is not needed. Vote "by eye". The main thing that you could understand - how much time should be spent to complete all the tasks in the list. It may happen that according to preliminary estimates, the entire list, you will need 2 months of net working time. If these tasks are not distributed in time, so that you really can fulfill them, then the list is absurd and requires optimization.
3. Optimize list. Not a simple matter. For one reason - to optimize it needed a serious and critical evaluation of their cases.
- Give to others all that they can do without you. There are doubts? Do you think you can do it better? Still give and put a reminder on control.
- Group your tasks. Take the time to process email and phone calls. Do similar things in a row. This saves time.
- Put all that can be done later. Even things associated with customers can be transferred. Simply arrange it. Assign contacts with customers more evenly. Change dates where this can be done. Free yourself room to maneuver.
- Remove all that lost its relevance. Ruthlessly kill tasks, the appropriateness of which is doubtful.
4. Perform tasks in order. Sort the list of tasks from smallest to largest. This means that at first go the shortest time business. Make all things that require less than 30 - 40 minutes. Do them in succession until the end. Forget about everything else. When the short-run problem, okinte list view. Surely he has become more real and can work with it. Maybe you can even resume the flow of tasks. In any case, plan all the remaining tasks so that you are almost 100% probability of them were able to perform as scheduled. And even create yourself a reserve of time to 15-20% of the time required to solve the problem. Who better unfinished than the remake.
5. Say "no" hard planning. In any case not strictly limit the time and deadline for the task. Now rigid planning is your enemy. Strict planning effectively in a situation of relatively stable control. Now everything is very shaky. So give yourself the time and the proportion of liberties. Do not drive your brain into the framework. Otherwise, you come back to where you started. You need calm, measured to perform the task from the list in due course. Once again - in order. Do not handle the task until you have completed the previous one. One task at a time.
Most importantly - understand and accept the fact that you can not afford to stop and get my affairs in order.
Five of the above steps have proven effective in practice. They are effective in order to "extinguish fires" and "raking debris", but work needs to be constructed so that such situations do not arise. Do you think that you need to do to not lead to the extreme?