Too Many Things - Sven Amann

This resource first appeared in issue #14 on 17 Mar 2020 and has tags Managing Your Career: Productivity, Strategy: Prioritization

As research computing team members and managers, we all have way too many things on our plate, and the battle to being productive and effective is focussing relentlessly on our priorities and letting less important tasks slide.

I actually generally do a pretty decent job of that - except when workloads peak and I’m much busier than normal, which is of course exactly when I need to be best at focussing on the priorities.

In this blog post, Sven Amann describes going through a process (recommended at least as far back as 1967, but also described in this Manager-Tools episode on prioritization) of timing one’s work for a while - it doesn’t have to be very fine grained, here he put his time into one of 13 buckets - and seeing how it lined up with his most important priorities. Like most of us, the results aren’t especially pretty. Going through this once can be a bit of a sobering process, but it’s a baseline that can be used as a point of comparison. And seeing exactly how much time is spent on tasks that could be done by someone else or done more efficiently can be a way to encourage change.