Honestly, I was inspired by the latest ‘issue’ of Capt. Varchar(MAX) and the Pagelatch Posse to write about how I manage my workload.
I used to scribble tasks down on sticky notes and stick them to the bottom of my monitor. This worked when I was only working on one project/task at a time and could break things down into linear tasks. As my workload and responsibilities increased, this method fell apart pretty quickly. Before long, my monitor looked like a sunflower made of sticky notes. Changing the priority of a task meant rearranging the sticky notes and heaven forbid that I have to take them all off and rearrange them and drop them on the floor in the process.
From the mess of sticky notes, I switched to using a pad of paper and making to do lists. This rapidly turned into a “wish I could do” list and I stopped using this technique, in favor of trusting my exceptionally rusty memory.
A few major mishaps later it was determined by everyone involved that my memory couldn’t be trusted. This is around the time that I found out about Getting Things Done. I attempted to work the GTD magic fully and it didn’t really work well for me. Something about it never clicked, maybe because I’m not an email person for tracking tasks – most people will send requests for 4 or 5 things in a single email and that makes it difficult to track my work load.
These days I use a 5×8 spiral bound notebook. At the beginning of each week, I start a new page and write the date at the top. Every to do item gets an empty box drawn next to it. When I finish that item I check it off. I carry this notebook everywhere I go, so this method works well for me.
Just to make sure I hold myself accountable to the people who request work from me, I use outlook tasks. When a request comes in via email, I immediately mark that email for follow up today. Tomorrow it will turn red in my in box and I can readily see which tasks I should have already finished. I don’t mark the task as finished until I’ve actually emailed the original person and told them that everything is complete. This works particularly well for tracking stored procedure/database change requests.
It’s not the best system on earth, but it works for the moment.
Any better ideas out there? Let me know in the comments.
