My boss, Steve (why are there so many Steves?), recently inspired me to re-read David Allen's Getting Things Done. Allen has a point that applies perfectly to me: I don't get stressed out about having to do things, I get stressed out about having to remember things. His solution is equally obvious - write stuff down. Whenever you think of something that needs doing, either do it now or write it down. Review your big list of stuff weekly.
This all works very well for an individual. For an organization to be effective, it should follow the same principles. Write everything down in a place where everyone can see it. At work, we use an in-house ticketing system that parallels many, many similar systems in IT departments across the world. Basically everyone has a TO DO list. You can add stuff to someone's list, finish stuff on your list, or move stuff from your list to someone else's. When a task is done, it goes back to the person who created it to check.
It's simple, and it works amazingly well. A manager can very quickly determine if an employee is overloaded with work and sort things out accordingly. We have a simple 1-6 numeric priority system that tells everyone the difference between background tasks, regular tasks and "do this right f*cking now" tasks. More importantly, we don't lose stuff. If we decide not to do something, someone has to put their name on it and say so. We only lose stuff that isn't in the system.
Why doesn't every organization use a similar system? There are several open source implementations that are free (both as in beer and as in speech) for the taking. It would seem to me that many employees in large organizations make hundreds of decisions a month with no records. Do these organizations really expect people to remember all of them? How many tasks "fall through the cracks" and cause delays or cost overruns later? The answer is so obvious... write it down!
This addresses the task management problem pretty well, and at our company it's essentially solved. Time management is another issue. At my office, I'm a somewhat contentious resource (although I think of myself as a person) that needs to be involved right at the end of many projects. This can lead to scheduling problems. Unfortunately, a shared calendar system, like the task system above, doesn't really exist for Windows without shelling out the megabucks for Exchange. It makes me want a Mac... everything I need could be done with iCal.
So we use a spreadsheet on a file share. Low tech, but it works.
Scheduling introduces a new and interesting problem: 100% resource utilization. For some reason, people seem to think it's OK to book 100% of my time in a given week. In general, I spend 1.5 to 2 days every week on tasks that were not scheduled in advance. This may be because we didn't know about them (ie: server's hard drive blows up), we did know about them, but a deadline got changed (ie: client freak-out) or we did know about them and didn't bother to schedule. Unfortuantely, leaving 1.5 - 2 days free on a schedule looks like "wasted time" to those who manage.
I have been getting into the habit of marking 1.5 days of time and assigning it to "background tasks" in advance. These are things that have no associated timeline, and so can (and do) get pushed back indefinitely. Unfortunately, there are times when a full week is scheduled to the hilt and there's nothing I can do about it. This is probably my single biggest source of on-the-job stress, and Allen offers no solution.
Maybe some of my readers will.
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