Triage Mindset: Say No and Assess Urgency

I want to begin today’s episode by thanking you for listening to this podcast. Earlier this week, this podcast surpassed one million downloads. 

For context, that puts this podcast in the top 3 to 5 percent of the productivity and time management niche. 

So, thank you. I do this for you, and for all of you who have sent in questions for answering. You keep me on my toes and challenge me every week. For that, I am eternally grateful.

Thank you.

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Script | 386

Hello, and welcome to episode 386 of the Your Time, Your Way 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 of this show. 

This week’s question is about a subject I’ve always been a little afraid of covering. I’m afraid because there is no simple answer, yet it’s certainly one that has a solution. Unfortunately, that solution isn’t an easy one to implement. 

How do you manage your time and productivity in a dynamic, fast changing work environment? 

The problem is that standard advice often doesn’t work. For instance, if you are in IT support and systems and company wide software are continually breaking down, how do you find the time to do focused work, when you are being interrupted by emergencies from the moment you arrive at work to the time you leave? 

It does have a solution, but it involves the word “no” and the use of experience and knowledge to determine how “urgent” something really is. 

I’m currently reading Dominic Sandbrook’s book, Seasons in the Sun. It’s about Britain between 1974 and 1979. Five years when the British government was in perpetual turmoil. Not just dealing with one or two crises. There were hundreds and they were happening every day. 

From economic breakdown to Northern Ireland being on the verge of civil war. Every day brought a new emergency that needed instant solutions. 

Reading it today makes the political turmoils we face now look like a walk on the beach by comparison.

Yet the government managed, just. It wasn’t easy, but they muddled through, and economic collapse and Northern Ireland civil war did not happen. It was close, but these catastrophes were fortunately averted. 

Reading about it now, it seems the UK between 1975 and 1980 was collapsing, yet as Dominic Sandbrook points out, it didn’t and most people were able to get on with their lives and improve their living standards. 

If you’re working in an environment where you feel you are only one crisis away from a total shutdown, don’t despair. It can be handled, and it’s possible to implement some processes and techniques to maintain some sanity when you may feel things are about to fall apart. 

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 Jan. Jan asks, Hi Carl, I work in a company with no boundaries. Anyone can send a Teams message to me anytime, and I am expected to deal with it immediately. This means I never have time to do my important work. What advice would you give to someone in my position? 

Thank you, Jan for your question.

One of the most dangerous things one can do is to believe there is no way through when the work piles up and there seems to be no respite. 

The first place I would begin in your situation, Jan, is to look at the type of requests you are getting. Not all of them will be urgent must be done immediately. 

It’s also likely when you look at them, you will find that very few are of that nature. 

Back in the day, when I worked in hotel management, it could be said that no one day was ever the same. And there were a lot of unknowns happening practically every minute. 

Yet, our training was build on understanding what was urgent and what was not. 

A business party turning up at 8:30 am asking where their pre-booked meeting room was, when no such room had been prepared was a drop everything and get the room set up urgently.

Similarly, a guest asking for a hairdryer, was also a drop everything urgency—it was likely they discovered their hairdryer was not working after they had just washed their hair.

Yet most other requests were handled in the normal fashion. A change of towels, a noisy air conditioner that won’t turn off or missing bottles of water from a room’s mini-bar.

All of these “urgencies” would have been unknown when the day began, but given that they happened every day, the hotel had processes in place to deal with them. 

One thing we did have, which I notice many companies do not, is a clear list of priorities. 

Take for example my priorities for handling email. 

Anything to do with money or forgotten passwords are things I will deal with immediately I see the email. Sorting them out doesn’t take long—five minutes for most—but I understand how frustrating it can be waiting to get a response. 

Everything else has a 24 hour response cycle. 

It’s rare I will get either of those two emergencies—perhaps one or two a month—but when they do happen, it’s automatic for me to immediately jump into action and deal with them. 

And that’s one of the first things I would recommend you do, Jan. Categorise the requests you get and put in place some rules for dealing with them. 

What are genuine emergencies? What are not? 

I know if you are new to your company, there will be a period where you will need to learn what’s urgent and what’s not. That’s where experience and knowledge comes into play. 

Given time, you will be able to analyse the types of requests you are getting and learn the patterns. There will be some people you work with that expect immediate responses. Is that a people issue or a genuine problem issue. 

Some people have become conditioned to expect an immediate response. With these people it might be prudent to slowly change their conditioning by gradually reducing your response time. 

Now, of course, you may not be able to do with people in higher positions than you but for others you may be able to do so. 

In Your Time, Your Way, I wrote about how emergency room medical staff use the medical triage method. Each patient is assessed against a scale or urgency. 

A Level 1 needs immediate attention and their condition is life-threatening, Level 2 is urgent attention required as their is potentially a threat to life, Level 3 requires timely intervention but life is not threatened, Level 4 is less urgent, and Level 5 can wait for care.

You can use this approach when you are dealing with customer care or IT issues. 

Monitor the requests you get over a week or so and grade them. You may not need five levels, three or four levels would be sufficient. For example:

A Level one request requires immediate attention.
A Level two request requires attention within two hours

A Level three request can be dealt with within the day

And a Level four can be ignored. 

You will need to be careful not to treat everything as a Level One. If everything was a level one, then nothing would be urgent because everything was. 

One of the great things about this kind of approach is there’s no hesitation. You know exactly what to do. If something is urgent, for example, the whole company’s system goes down or there is a security breach, everything stops until the issue is resolved. 

Hopefully, this kind of emergency won’t happen often. If it does, then there’s likely to be a problem in the company’s systems that need fixing and that would need to be escalated to the relevant person. 

The next problem in these circumstances is that you may feel obligated to be constantly watching your email and internal messaging system. If you want to be able to get on and do your work, that’s going to be a no no. 

You cannot do both. There has to be some flexibility. 

What I’ve found helpful for many of my coaching clients is to protect the first thirty minutes of their work day for going through all their communication channels to see what’s happening. 

This way, you can deal with any immediate problems before they destroy your day. 

Then the next hour (or two if you dare), you do your focused work. 

You can then check your messages and emails once you have finished your focused work. It’s only one hour. 

If you’ve never done this before, I should warn you that it will be scary. You’re likely to have become used to being reactive, and changing that to being proactive by focusing on your most important work for the day for an hour or so, can be deeply uncomfortable at first. 

Here you will need to be persistent. It gets easier, and your confidence grows with time. 

I used to be always checking my mail for “problems”. It was horrible. It took me several weeks to become comfortable turning off all communication systems for two hours while I got on and did my most important work for the day. 

But it was worth it. For one thing, I began understand that most things were not really urgent and as long as I responded within twenty-four hours people were happy. 

For you, you may need to respond faster than that. But it’s unlikely that you will need to be responding immediately to everything.

You’ve got to remember that no matter what work you do there is always a limited resource—time. You get twenty-four hours each day and that’s it. No more and no less.

And while you can expand that to a week, that still only gives you 168 hours. 

However, careful management of that time can help to reduce many emergencies. Ruthlessly protecting one or two hours a day for your most important work, for example, ensures that you are not dealing with final demands and missed deadlines. 

One way to do that is to again monitor when most of your requests come in. I’ve learned that between 9:30 and 11:30 am it’s extremely rare for me to receive an urgent request. This is why I protect that time on my calendar for doing my most important work for the day. 

Most of the urgent requests I get come in through the night, and I always keep 9:00 to 9:30 am free for dealing with them if they do arise. 

So there you go, Jan. The best thing you could do right now is to start analysing the requests you are getting and to develop a triage system for prioritising those request. 

You’re not changing anything immediately, but you are gaining information you can then use to develop a process for reducing the urgency and for bringing some structure back into your work day. 

You will feel uncomfortable when you first begin implementing these changes, and you may get some pushback from your colleagues, that’s the be expected, but it’s important to persist if you want to gain some control back. 

You may find you will need to adjust things. That’s normal. Don’t worry, just because you need to move things around in your categorisation system doesn’t mean it’s failed. Your adjusting, learning and, more importantly, improving your system. 

I hope that has helped, Jan. Thank you for your question. And thank you to you too for listening. It just remains for me to wish you all very very productive week.