Beat the Workload Blues

By Barb Springer Beck

May 2004

Do you ever feel overwhelmed by your workload?  At various points during our careers, all of us are likely to experience a feeling of having too much to get done and not enough time to do it.  How we manage this pressure to perform will be key to our ultimate success.  Learning to consciously manage our work is a critical skill to master.  The risk of not doing so may mean that your workload will manage you. 

When we don’t do a good job of managing our workloads, we risk unintended consequences that adversely affect our reputations, our careers, and even our self-confidence.  Missed deadlines, high stress levels on the job and at home, poor decision-making, increased costs, and lost opportunities are all potential consequences of poor workload management.  Karen was assigned to prepare an environmental analysis for a prescribed burn planned for the coming spring.  When she was called off her unit to conduct a fire fatality investigation, she was unable to get her work done on the analysis.  As a result, the burn did not occur in the spring as had been planned and her unit missed producing the acre target they had been assigned.  Fair or not, despite the fact that Karen was working on another high priority task, she was blamed for the failure of the field office to carry out the planned burn and the fact that the opportunity to burn was lost for another year.  Had Karen tried some of the suggestions below, the circumstances might have turned out more positively.

It’s inadvisable in the work world to make promises that one doesn’t intend to deliver on.  So, what causes us, despite our good intentions, to miss deadlines or fail to deliver what we’ve promised?  Work demands may be either externally generated (by your supervisor, work peers, the media, or a court imposed deadline, for example), or internally generated (by a goal or task you set for yourself).  In general, we have more ability to manage the demands we place on ourselves, but there’s every reason to try and influence the nature and timing of assignments given to us by others or promises made by others on which we must deliver.   

Here are some things you can do to get and keep a handle on all of the demands placed upon you at work.

As long as there is more work than time, work must be prioritized.  Have you ever realized with horror that you’ve worked on something you enjoy to the exclusion of a more important project that has a deadline rapidly approaching?  Prioritizing is that constant but critical task of ordering your work to ensure that your time is spent on the most important and urgent tasks.  Not all important tasks are urgent, but time must also be set aside to accomplish those important tasks.  Rachel was responsible for giving annual performance evaluations to the employees she supervised.   At the end of each fiscal year, she had six weeks in which to accomplish the individual evaluations.  Believing that the evaluations were an important coaching opportunity, Rachel scheduled a small amount of time each day starting at the end of the fiscal year to prepare meaningful feedback for her staff.  In this way, she was able to easily meet the six-week requirement for completing the evaluations and give them the attention they deserved.

When the deadline is hard, fast, and out of your control, and the task is critical, enlist some assistance.  A position Jenny had been interested in for some time finally opened up.  To be considered for the position, Jenny had two weeks to submit her application.   Unfortunately, at the time she had a full plate of other assignments.  Rather than let the opportunity pass her by, Jenny asked a co-worker to help her organize her work experience and proof read the evaluation criteria she had drafted.  A small amount of time from her knowledgeable co-worker helped Jenny do the best job possible on her application in spite of the fact that she had a limited amount of time to spend on it.

For the most part, our supervisors want us to be successful in our jobs and in many cases their success hinges upon ours.  For that reason, if your supervisor gives you an unreasonable deadline you need to let him or her know how difficult it will be to make the deadline and what trade-offs on other work might be necessary.  Shelly felt certain that try as she might she would not be able to prepare her program budget request if she also had to finish the revision of an allotment plan at the same time.  When she raised this concern to her supervisor, they agreed that the schedule for the allotment plan needed to slip by two weeks so Shelly could complete the budget request on time.

When Liz was first appointed to her position and felt the need to get up to speed, she scheduled meetings with her staff of eight employees once a week.  After becoming more comfortable in her new role and confident that information was being shared as needed, she decided that staff meetings every other week would suffice.  She and her staff used e-mail and briefing papers between meetings if they needed to convey information to one another, and all benefited from the time that was freed-up by less frequent meetings.

Delegation is a great tool if you can give work to a qualified individual, and if you aren’t inappropriately dumping your undesirable work on someone else.  The key to delegating is ensuring that the person who receives the assignment has the time, ability, and resources to successfully accomplish the task.  Ellen had directly trained and overseen the volunteers conducting bird counts on her refuge for a long time.  Although she enjoyed working with the volunteers, she had less time available for this activity following her promotion to supervisor.  Her new staff, however, included individuals who could train and guide the volunteers and were anxious to do so.  By delegating the project to her staff, Ellen gained some valuable time for her new administrative duties and came to appreciate the enthusiasm her staff brought to the task.  Similarly, they appreciated the confidence Ellen showed in them to handle the task.

Nancy produced great results in a wetland restoration project by trying some new techniques.  Excited about the success of the project she had completed, Nancy wanted to share what she had learned with other hydrologists.  She contacted the editor of her professional association’s newsletter offering to write an article.  After agreeing to produce the article, she realized that she currently had a number of other pressing commitments.  Because contributing the article was important to her, she decided to go ahead with the article, but she set a hard time limit of 20 hours for herself.  By closely managing her time, she was able to write the article after all.  

As a well-respected manager, Beth was constantly being asked to serve on regional task forces addressing agency policy.  Most of the task force work involved time away from her regular duties and Beth found herself slipping further behind in her work.  Because she had a lot to offer the regional efforts and she enjoyed the challenges, Beth was not willing to give up the special assignments completely.  Out of fairness to her staff and to get her own work done, she decided to accept no more than one task force assignment per year.

As an administrative officer, Sandy felt pulled in every direction all the time.  Completely overwhelmed by the myriad of programs she had to oversee, her work was constantly interrupted and even her desk became piled so high with papers she was unable to quickly find what she needed at any given time.  Sandy finally had enough and decided to make a few small changes.  She cleaned up her desk, organized a personal filing system, instituted “do not disturb” hours from 9-11 a.m. every day, and began playing calming music on a CD player in her office.  During the hours she set aside for her undisturbed work, she was able to think more clearly and tackle larger tasks without interruption.  Although she still had a great deal of work to accomplish, Sandy’s workload felt much more manageable to her simply because she was working more effectively.

Finally, in the spirit of candor rather than a poor work attitude, you still may be asked, or even told, to produce something by a certain date that you know you will be unlikely to meet.  When that happens, don’t wait—speak up right away.  When informed, perhaps your supervisor will assign the task to someone else, or allow you more time to get it done.  You might be able to easily prevent a future disaster by being honest at the outset.  Do be careful, however, in how you broach the subject because you could be seen as being unjustifiably negative.

Managing your work obligations is not an easy task, but who better than you to do it?  Demands and priorities change, sometimes on a daily basis, and you will need to continually re-assess, re-prioritize, and adapt accordingly in order to be successful.  If you do well at managing your work, you’ll reduce your stress levels, feel more in control of your time and energy, and gain a reputation for being one who can be counted on to deliver as promised.