In this series, I describe all of the different methodologies I employ and encourage others to try to feel less burnt out, more focused and ultimately feel better during their working day. Most of these are also job-agnostic so non-technical people - feel free to read on!
What?
The phrase "I am a natural multitasker" or "I just juggle stuff all day" goes straight through me. If you're a person who says this, I can say with relative certainty that you may do some tasks concurrently, but you do none of them well. It sounds insane for me, a serial single tasker to say this now but you can only do one thing at a time.
Why?
As you climb up the seniority ladder you will ultimately be leaned on more for your expertise, guidance and if you're technical, debugging. More distractions, more people, more demand = evitable context switching. You open Slack/Teams or whatever IM client in the morning and you're presented with a Christmas tree of chatter; it happens (*there's stuff as an organisation you can do to mitigate this - more on that later...) - or if you're still working in the 90s, you're inbox is full of "demanding" emails.
So, why is it bad to rifle through all of these as fast as possible, context-switching as much as possible because the Christmas tree lights need to be individually turned off?
Well here's why:
- You will miss important contextual details on your road to mark things as read
- You will forget about that "5 minute thing" you said you'd do "soon"
- You will overcommit to stuff you don't have time for
So what can you do?:
- Spend X amount of time (usually minutes prioritising) - For this I have a personal task backlog which is constructed and reprioritised throughout the day. Those familiar with Agile should be familiar with a backlog and also familiar that personal backlog items belong nowhere near the Product backlog. For those not familiar, in simple terms, it's a list in which the order of importance can change dependant on demands.
- Once prioritised - I determine the steps to completion for the task. A task is not always immediately and solely achievable; sometimes it involves collecting people or third parties and arranging dedicated sessions.
- I "complete" that task and that task ONLY - that task may be completed by scheduling a meeting, emailing a third party or dealing with an issue immediately and solely by me. Either way; a task completion is a path forward, or a direct resolution.
- I move onto my next task, in priority order.
I have scheduled appointments set with myself for personal backlog repriorisation throughout the day.
Doing the above means I suffer less from context-switching, over-promising and I make sure that my focus is 100% on the task I am working on.
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