What Does Your Task Level Look Like?

What do you need to pay attention to if you are to build yourself a solid, sustainable productivity system?

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Episode 245 | Script

Hello, and welcome to episode 245 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein, and I am your host for this show.

I am usually asked to help someone when their productivity and or time management has collapsed. This usually happens because, since the day they started their first job, they have been able to breeze through their work, relying on their boss or customers to tell them what to do. 

I know when I started my work life, for the best part of the first ten years, there was also someone in the background telling me what I needed to do next and holding me accountable.

Inevitably, there comes a time when you will be given responsibility for your own work. You’re given more freedom to decide what to do with your time and you too now need to guide new members of the company and tell them what needs to happen next. 

It’s at this point if you do not have a system to manage your work, projects and responsibilities that things begin to crack and fall apart. 

So, this week, I am looking at what you can o to avoid this from happening and to help you transition from where you are today to the next level—whatever that may be—be that promotion to management or starting your own business.

So, with that said, let me hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question.

This week’s question comes from Riccardo. Riccardo asks: Hi Carl, I’ve recently been promoted, and I’ve found myself drowning in work. I am having to take a lot of work home and working late into the night and at weekends. Do you have any tips on managing a sudden increase in workload? 

Hi Riccardo, thank you for your question and congratulations on your recent promotion. 

One of the most important things you can do to be prepared for increasing workloads is to have a ‘how can I do it better mindset’. When I learned the power of this simple question, a lot of positive changes happened for me. 

To give you one example, many years ago, not long after I became a teacher, I was assigned what was called a free talking class. This class took a topical news article, which we read out in class, then discussed it. Having one of these classes a week was manageable, but when I had to prepare fief articles for the week, what was originally an hour of preparation turned into six hours. 

I had to find a suitable article, highlight difficult words and phrases and create three to five questions to get the students talking. 

Spending six hours on a Sunday looking for and preparing articles was not my idea of using my time on a Sunday well. So, I asked the question: how can I do this better?

I soon found I could spend the week collecting articles into a read list as I was reading the news each day—this was something I did every day anyway. If I came across an article that might be suitable for my free talking classes, I could save the article (I had to use my browser’s bookmarks for this back then—no easy-to-use read later services then) and all I needed to do on a Sunday was to prepare the document. I managed to reduce those six hours down to ninety minutes. 

It’s a simple yet powerful question we can all use with tasks and jobs that we feel are taking too much time—How can I do it better? 

If you are ever feeling overloaded and stretched to your limit, it usually means the processes you have in place are too complex, or you haven’t fine-tuned them, so they work seamlessly.

One of the reasons so few people ever become consistent with daily and weekly planning is because the first few times you do it, it takes a long time. It would not be unusual for your first weekly planning session to take two hours or more. Likewise, your daily planning will likely take thirty-plus minutes when you first begin doing it. 

However, those first few are important because as you are doing them, you learn what needs looking at and what doesn’t. 

In David Allen’s Getting Things Done Book, he advocates reviewing all your projects each week. Yet, most of your projects don’t need reviewing so frequently. I have about twelve projects left for this year. To follow the GTD standard, I’d be reviewing projects that are not moving forward right now. That’s a waste of time. I know these projects are not moving forward, nothing needs to be done on them for the next two to three months, so I don’t review them. 

The only projects I look at are my current, active ones. These are moving forward and all I am looking for is what needs to happen next. 

Let me give you an example of a small project I have at the moment. 

I am re-doing my profile photos so I can update my website. This small project was complicated a few weeks ago when I had my eyes tested and ordered a new pair of glasses. These glasses took a couple of weeks to arrive, and now they are at the opticians having the new lenses put in. 

This is complicated by a big public holiday this weekend, so I don’t expect my new glasses to arrive for around ten days. As I don’t know when they will arrive, I cannot book an appointment at the photographers. So, this project is on hold for now.

This means that when I did my weekly planning on Saturday, that project was skipped. Everything I needed to do is done. I’ve got the new glasses, my eyes have been tested, and I now have to wait for ten days or so for the new glasses to arrive. Nothing will happen next week. So, that project is not reviewed.

Now, I do have the next task in my task manager—book photographer—but it is in my next week folder. Nothing needs to be done this week, so I don’t need it coming up and distracting me. I will see that task when I do my next weekly planning session, and I can decide if I want to bring things forward or not then. 

Everything you do can be improved by a process. Once you have a process in place, you can then apply the question: how can I do it better? To the process. 

Now, you didn’t mention what your old role was and so I don’t know what changes have occurred with your new role, Riccardo, but let’s say you were previously a salesperson and now you are a sales manager. This is actually quite a big change in a person’s work. 

You’ve gone from managing customers and prospects to managing salespeople who do that. So, the first step is to establish what your new core work is.

Is it allocating targets to your team? Developing forecasts for your boss? Hiring new salespeople? Training your sales team? 

This is the first step. What is your core work? Once you know what your core work is, what does that look like at a task level? 

Let’s take forecasting as an example. We might be told our new responsibility is to present a monthly sales forecast every month at the departmental heads meeting. That’s great. We know what one of our core tasks is. However, what does that look like at a task level? 

The danger here is we add a task that says: Prepare this month's sales forecast, yet is that really the task? What does that involve? 

It could be you need to collect current sales data, review last year's sales data and calculate your forecast based on market conditions and past sales. That’s not a single task. That’s a minimum of three tasks. 

If this were your core work, you might have a task in the second week of the month telling you to collect the data. In the third week, you could add a second task to read up on the current market environment and perhaps add the new figures to your sales forecast file. 

Now, what was possibly a four-hour task has been broken down into tasks that take no more than an hour or so. 

You set these tasks as recurring tasks in your task manager, so they come up when they are due, so you no longer need to keep them stored in your head. 

Now to deal with the current issue of having to take work home with you, what is the work you are taking home? What’s preventing you from dealing with that work while you are at work? 

Now, a lot of this extra work is caused by too many meetings throughout the day and interruptions throughout the working day. 

The first step here is to gain control of your calendar. This begins by blocking times out in the day when you are not available for meetings. The great thing here is you do not need to block a great deal of time. Most people find if they can get two hours a day for focused work, that is enough to stay on top of the critical work. This leaves six hours each day for meetings and being available for other people. 

Ideally, you want to block the same time out each day, but that may not be possible. If not, create the blocks, and when you do the weekly planning and move them around so they fit into your days for the following week. 

Next up dealing with interruptions. Here you need to learn to say no. That’s hard, particularly for salespeople, because they come from a place where everything is possible and yes is the default. 

Again, this doesn’t need a lot of effort. I remember when I was working in a law office, my boss had a fantastically simple system. If he need time to work on a difficult case, he would close his office door. This meant we all knew if his door was closed, we could not interrupt him. If it was open, we could walk in and ask anything. 

My boss closed his door around three or four times a week, and everyone knew the “code”—so to speak. 

Don’t be afraid of closing your door. If you explain to your team when your door is closed not to disturb you, your team will respect your request. 

I remember, no matter how urgent something was, if my boss’s door was closed, I would have to wait. If I had a screaming client on the end of the phone, I would calmly explain my boss was unavailable at the moment, but as soon as it was available, I would ask him and get back to them. For four years, I never had an issue with that. 

So, Riccardo, the first step is to list out your new core work. What does that look like at a task level? Get those tasks set up in your task manager or calendar as recurring tasks or events. 

Get comfortable blocking time out on your calendar for focused work. Then when you are in a focused work session, make sure nobody disturbs you. 

Finally, make sure you are doing a weekly daily planning session. Remember, not all projects need attention every week. All that really matters is what needs your attention next week. In the daily planning session review your tasks and appointments for the next day and make sure they are realistic. Don’t try and be a hero and convince yourself you can attend six meetings and clear fifty tasks—you can’t, and you won’t. Get real. 

I hope these ideas help, Riccardo. Thank you for your question, and thank you to you, too, for listening. It just remains for me now to wish you all a very, very productive week.