4 Keys to Manage Being Swamped

Posted by in Career Advice •


If you're like most people, your workload far exceeds the amount of time you have in your day. Not only is being swamped stressful, but it can have a negative impact on your productivity, making you more prone to procrastination and other bad habits. Here are four tips employees can use to gain more control in their jobs.


  1. Practice good listing: The first step to managing your tasks is to prioritize them. Create three sections on a piece of paper and mark them "Urgent," "Important," and "Can Wait." Then, separate your tasks according to importance. It can be challenging determining where to place projects because it can feel as though everything is urgent. One trick that can help is to think about the consequences related to not completing the task right that moment. Tasks with dire and immediate consequences should be placed in the urgent pile, while those with minimal penalties can be put on the can wait list.
     
  2. Abandon multitasking: It's common to multitask, but it doesn't work. In fact, multitasking could even be hurting productivity. It takes time to focus your mind on a task. Each time you stop, you have to spend precious minutes reorienting yourself to pick up where you left off. Instead of attempting to do five things at once, focus on working on one task for a period of time. For example, you can spend one hour clearing out your email box and the next hour returning phone calls.
     
  3. Chunk it: Be honest—you probably read that as "chuck it." While it can be tempting to take the work on your desk and toss it out the window, doing so will only provide momentary relief and just make more work for you. Instead, plow through projects by dedicating chunks of uninterrupted time to working on them. For instance, you can work on priority projects every day until lunchtime. Not all jobs offer this flexibility, so do the best with the schedule available to you.
     
  4. Take a break: Most jobs allow employees to take lunch breaks during the day. However, you should also endeavor to take a five-minute break each hour. Take a quick walk around the office, do some stretching exercises, or go outside and breathe fresh air for a few minutes. Doing so will help refresh your mind and energize you to continuing tackling your workload.

Unfortunately, being overloaded with work is the norm in today's jobs. However, with some planning and a little organization, you can complete projects in a timely manner. Consistently apply these tips to gain more control over your workday.

(Photo courtesy of Michal Marcol / freedigitalphotos.net)
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  • Karen Hunter
    Karen Hunter •
    very informative
  • Cecelia Bray
    Cecelia Bray •
    Thank you- this has really clarified how to get a million things completed. Multitasking has caused me to miss priority deadlines and my listing was a single column instead of three. Very helpful, thank you.
  • Debra Houston
    Debra Houston •
    These are excellent suggestions and ones that I have actually used.  I know they work.  The article is correct about multi-tasking.  It  doesn't work.  In the end, you tend to make more mistakes because you are less focused on each task.  Really enjoyed the article.
  • Tracy Thatcher
    Tracy Thatcher •
    Great article.  Thank You.
  • Nancy Fink
    Nancy Fink •
    Organizing into columns and prioritizing is a great idea and I will put this into practice.
  • Mary Marshall
    Mary Marshall •
    Being able to stay focused on a project is important.  What is called multitasking becomes more like micro-managing which is detrimental to productivity. When a person starts one project and have to switch to another project and go back to the previous project, time management is not being utilized to get the best work performance out of the employee. The wheels of progress will start to slow down and the employee will experience burn out really fast. There is no one person who will work the same as another.  Finding one's comfort zone to get the job done and making sure the end result is accomplished is the important aspect of the job.
  • Steve Cipolla
    Steve Cipolla •
    Abandoning multi-tasking is the best advice.  So many people  are proud of the number of things they can handle simultaneously, but my experience is that increased ability to multitask correlates positively to increased mediocrity in performance.   You simply cannot focus on a task and perform it at the your best if you are multitasking.  Take a lesson from Albert Einstein's work ethic.  The great physicist was known for sitting quietly for hours on end concentrating his mind on a single equation.  Now, we can't all produce the General Theory of Relativity; but we can adopt the single-minded focus model of working on our tasks.  It's the only to produce at your highest and best level.

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