Whether or not your job requires you to supervise others, you’ll often find yourself caught up with multiple projects or tasks that all seem to have a high priority assigned to them. Sometimes that’s true, and it doesn’t help if your boss keeps lumping stuff onto your plate -- it can make managing your time difficult and affect the quality of your work. Every now and again this can become a little overwhelming.
The problem is compounded if you’re responsible for the activities or performance of other employees. As they wait on you for directions or feedback and you’re now getting pressure from above and below to finish your to-do list, being stuck in the middle quickly becomes no fun at all. Situations like this are occasionally further complicated when your boss doesn’t set you up for success by giving you the tools or resources you need.
An example of this scenario might be having quarterly production reports due to your corporate office, a monthly safety huddle to plan and conduct with your entire staff, manufacturing goals for that same staff to meet coming up shortly, a meeting with your director to report on those production numbers, a VIP visitor needing a tour, and a coaching session with a struggling employee. Also, maybe your HR office hasn’t provided you with last month’s lost-time injury numbers yet for your safety meeting. Sound familiar? Competing demands for your time and the stress that you experience are just the nature of the business for many jobs.
I have a suggestion for you: Be cool.
Easier said than done, right? I know, I know, I probably just lost some of my readers over that. Let me explain. It’s probably not time to freak out unless you’ve demonstrated complete and total negligence in managing your time. First of all, understand that your boss probably expects you to ask questions, not only to clarify expectations but also (infrequently, we hope) to push back and ask for more time or more reasonable goals if you can make a legitimate business case for such. Similarly, if you’re in a leadership position, your employees most likely understand that you’re incredibly busy and haven’t forgotten about them. Or you didn’t mean to, if you already have!
I’m not going to go into depth here about basic task prioritization - is it important? urgent? et cetera - since for the sake of this article we’re going to have some fun and assume that all of your tasks are critical with imminent deadlines. How to keep your cool in this case, then?
Let’s stick to the scenario laid out previously. Although you won’t always be able to make everything fit into your agenda, you can get a little creative and save yourself some headaches. Consider asking the VIP to sit in and observe your safety huddle; perhaps you’re able to delegate conducting this meeting to another employee, to get the team more engaged? While preparing your quarterly reports, shoot an email over to your director and explain that the VIP visit has necessitated pushing back your meeting. Although it’s not ideal to delay performance management for too long, save your coaching session with your employee for later on. If you’re going to be giving constructive rather than positive feedback, you don’t want to set the tone for your day by criticizing someone.
There will be times when you just aren’t able to complete every project on your plate, though. In these situations you need to think about how to accomplish those tasks which will have the greatest or most immediate impact. If there are heavy fines associated with not holding a safety meeting on time, then focus on that before you conduct any other meetings. No one wants to compromise safety anyway. If your tasks involve settling matters that affect employee job security, don’t delay on those more than a day or two. You don’t want to hold off on giving employees feedback on their performance for too long, if you have an employee producing defective brake rotors into mid-May but you’ve known they were using the wrong set of moulds since early April.
The bottom line is that being smart about it will help you resolve many of your time management issues. There will be times when you won’t be able to complete all of your tasks in the most desirable amount of time. As long as this is due to circumstances outside the individual’s control and he or she is taking the initiative to prioritize intelligently, I don’t usually punish managers under me for not getting every single thing done when I’m the one adding tasks to their checklists. Do be diligent however; times like this are not for malingering or dawdling.
Finally, try not to let your stress drag down your peers or the people who report to you. Juggling multiple projects successfully sometimes just means getting the most impactful things done first. Keep your cool, get organized so you don’t lose track of the things you need to get done, and you’ll be all right.
Do you frequently find yourself piling up with tasks from every direction? How do you decide what’s most important or most time-sensitive? Please feel free to contribute to the discussion in the comments section! If you’ve enjoyed spending a few minutes reading “The Boss Perspective,” subscribe and share this site with your friends, Like me on Facebook, or follow me on Twitter @BossPerspective.
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