5 ways to deal with peak workload

Just want to let everyone know that I’m alright, in case you don’t see me that often these days, it’s because of the super workload that I’m taking on these two months. I will try to keep to blogging once a week to stay sane (see tip no. 2) as well.

Here’s how I deal with massive amounts of work in a short period of time.

1. Set a maximum amount of time you’ll work per day/week

In the knowledge economy, it’s not true that you only work 8.5 hours a day as stipulated in your work contract. Many of us work overtime with no extra pay anyway. The key here is to set a maximum that you can manage and stick to it. For example, I stare at work from the moment I reach office in the morning (about 9am) till around 6pm with 30 min lunch in between, then I usually take a complete rest for 3 hours before continuing till bed time. Add about 5 hours of work on Saturday and Sunday to that 12 hour day makes my own personal maximum at 70 hours per week.

2. Never let go of your primary ECA

ECA (Singapore speak: Extra Curricular Activity, usually means your primary hobby you do outside work) plays an important part in balancing yourself from being over worked. Whether it’s an activity you carry out with your loved ones or best friends, make sure you don’t skip it, as it’s easy to do so when it’s not compulsory. If it takes up too much time it’s ok to rationalize and scale down to a manageable commitment, but if you stop it, you risk creating an anxiety as you continue working knowing that your social circle is somewhere else wondering where you are.

Over the course of my work life, I’ve seen colleagues with ECAs ranging from sports, arts, to just plain zouking or gambling every week. Others simply commit to go to church on sunday morning, or volunteer for 2 solid hours. It doesn’t matter what you do, but do it regularly, and it will automatically balance your spirit as you charge through your work week.

3. Prioritize your work your way

When it comes to prioritizing work, I learn a lot from debt consolidation companies. There’s one particular strategy for getting people out of multiple debts that’s successful: Once a person has all his or her debt consolidated onto the lowest possible interest, the person then sorts all the debts by the amount owed instead of by the interest percentage, and pays off the cheapest debt first (e.g. pay utilities bill first instead of home mortgage). Although financially this means the person is not maximizing his dollars (as he ends up paying more interest), it creates high morale in the person’s urge to repay his debt.

So I sometime prioritize the same. There’s exceptionally a bucket of “cannot wait” work that anyway gets attention, but this bucket is usually small (I have at anyone time some 30 to 50 ToDo items sitting in my mailbox, and “cannot wait” work is usually 1, and it’s usually a manufactured emergency from boss, and from his/her boss, and so on). Beyond that, usually I start my day clearing out the smallest items (mostly routing) so that by evening I have one big item to tackle (usually creation, e.g. report / presentation). It’s dangerous, because the big item might end up ruining my sleep, but at least having nothing else to bother me for the rest of the day gives me the courage to tackle the big work item.

One side point: The wonders of technology can sometimes be baffling when it comes to simple things like prioritizing as it often put priority according to data it has, for example, it could prioritize your tasks based on age of due dates, or an arbitrary red/yellow/blue flag you set, etc. In real life, you end up working on the item that’s burning your backside first, with bosses hounding on you and customers chasing you. To add that human element into the priority, I prefer a hybrid solution of using mahjong paper and sticky notes, and create categories that makes sense on a wall, move the stickies around as I prioritize my day (alternative is to pencil on sheets of paper).

4. Always lookout for dovetailing opportunity

This is one of the most important lesson I’ve learned working in SingTel doing programme office / marketing like activities. There are actually so many redundant work and similar interest by so many parties from so many different departments (and external organizations too) that, if I can just bring all of them to collaborate on ONE thing together, everyone would be better off. After all, we are mostly measured by the impact of our work and not the amount of “hentak kaki” busy-ness with low results / yield.

Similar to all the other fields, unless you’re very specialized in the creation of some unique component of a value chain, usually there are many opportunities for leveraging each other to reduce the overall work. Internal to a company, one can try creating common templates, batching up delivery, consolidating / summarizing reports, standardizing workflows, and even finding that irrelevant work and simply stop doing it. External to a company, one can try reaching out to a wider base of vendors, streamlining multiple communication channels, creating peer support amongst customers, team up with other complementary companies in sales and marketing efforts, etc.

No matter how busy you become, never stop trying to reduce work for a greater impact.

5. Focus when working

After accomplishing the above, this is my own challenge – to stay focused throughout the peak period, without being distracted during allocated work time. MSN, Facebook etc. has already been blocked.

Much as I like to take the advise of batching up emails to only check them twice a day, my environment doesn’t allow for that (as some matters are being “chatted” over email) but that might work for you (check emails only twice: 11am and 4pm everyday). Another tip is to find the right “cone of silence”, a corner where you can be productive in clearing your work uninterrupted. In many offices, especially in those with “open concept” cubicles that’s catching on these day, it’s very hard to find silence. Use your creativity (some use ear phones, I simply migrate somewhere else to hide myself for that period of time) to help you stay focused.

You can refer to the gazillion articles on the web too.

Here’s one formula I use (again, out of a gazillion possible ones – create one for yourself) to stay focused is based on the human attention span. We tend be to be able to stay focused for 20 minutes, and in batches of 4 to 5 of these 20 minutes “slots” if you may. I usually try to finish all my small “items” within that 20 minutes “slots”, and in between 4 to 5 of these, I usually take a break (it’s mostly a food break). Often there are meetings throughout the day that will throw you off, so it’s important to plan ahead to ensure that the meetings either occur in succession, or there’s enough space in between for 1 or 2 of these “slots”. I leave hour long gaps usually for me to afford to do 2 slots of work. In fact, this blog entry is written in one “slot” – if I exceeded 20 minutes, I know it’s time to wrap up – especially when the body starts to react (by reaching out to facebook icon and what not). Staying focused an completing a task can help generate that sense of satisfaction that boost the morale to take on the next 20 minutes of work.

Stay sane!