I wanted to write a blog about a project manager’s workload because I’ve just had a few very busy weeks. They could have been very stressful, but thankfully I’ve managed to push through with only a small amount of stress, just enough to keep me on my toes!
I want you to know that if you feel like you have too much work on and are overloaded, that is completely normal. As project managers, we will always have periods like this. Sometimes it’s quiet, sometimes it’s manic. Also, as project managers, I feel like our stress is compounded because in a sense we carry the burden of the entire project’s success on our shoulders. Of course, there will be an exec out there somewhere who is accountable for the project, but believe me, that exec will be looking to us if the project is not delivering (plus they are paid a lot more to take on that kind of accountability).
So, there is a lot to be stressed about, I get it. However, even when the times are hard, you don’t have to kill yourself working ridiculous hours trying to get everything done. Believe me, it doesn’t matter if some of your actions don’t get done. It’s important that you understand this message, otherwise you are in danger of making your work life miserable.
I think we all know that we can’t get everything done, but we can certainly get some things done. So, we need to make sure those some things are the right things. It may sound obvious, but it is easy to focus on the wrong thing, especially if someone else is asking you to do it or you are constantly attending other people’s meetings.
So, what do we focus on? We focus on what I call the ‘high leverage’ activities. What are high leverage activities? I like to think of them as activities that have the highest return on investment. By doing them, they have the greatest impact on the project. By doing them, they often cause a chain reaction of smaller activities, like a domino effect. When all is said and done, a project manager’s main responsibility is keeping the plan on track, keeping it as green as possible. If you are struggling to think about what you should be doing next, look at your plan on a page and ask yourself ‘where is the project is at risk of slipping?’
That is where you should focus your time and energy. For example, you could have a phase of testing coming up, but you haven’t booked the test environment or secured a waiver for using live data. In that situation you should absolutely spend your time on booking the environment or getting the waiver because if you don’t, your plan will slip. Or maybe you are due to exit testing in couple of weeks, but you have a defect that you can’t seem to fix that could block the exit of testing. In this situation, focus on the stakeholder engagement to get a workaround sorted and agreement to push it to a fast follower for a warranty drop. If you you don’t, your plan will slip.
If you get the high leverage tasks done to keep the project on track, you can afford to let some of the other actions slip. You don’t need to kill yourself working 12 hours a day. By the way, if you are working 12 hours a day and you are loving it and crushing it, then that’s fine too. For most of us though, those kinds of hours are not sustainable. There comes a point when the extra hours you are putting in are not going to have a significant impact on the project. A good way to illustrate this is with the cost vs quality graph. In our context you could think of the cost as the cost of your time, effort, energy, or stress! Let’s call quality the ‘greenness’ of your project. Initially, as you are spending your energy you are getting great returns on your investment, but there comes a point where you really have to put in a huge amount of effort just to get little return. That is not good business sense. We must learn to let go because putting that extra effort in just isn’t worth the return.
Another thing to be aware of when we are going through stressful times is that sometimes the feeling of having too much work to do is an illusion. We believe we have too much work to do, but in reality, the situation is not so dire. It’s just a feeling, an emotional state. This often happens on a particularly busy day, you are back-to-back in meetings and multitasking, and you’ve got four people pinging you on instant messenger asking for different things – and they are all urgent. You say to yourself ‘I have a million things to do!’. Really? That many? You have one million things to do? What are they, then? When you start to feel overwhelmed like this, just stop. Take a breath. Remind yourself that you can only do one thing at a time. Get some clarity – write down the list of all the key things you need to do. Now estimate roughly how long each one will take – often many of the actions will be things like –
Call Someone
Email someone
Set up a meeting
Fill in the timesheet
These actually don’t take that long to do. In fact, with a few hours of solid and uninterrupted focus you could blast through them quickly. Now, I know this is not always the case but often the stress of feeling overwhelmed with too much to do isn’t backed by a real never ending to do list.
One more tip to help you with the feeling of having too much to do. Try and capture all your actions in one place. For example, you could capture them all at the back of your notebook. Once they are captured, you can relax a bit. They are not going anywhere. You might find that this list keeps getting bigger and bigger, but that’s okay as long as you make it a habit to check your list at regular intervals. Could be once a day, could be twice a week, could be once a week. The point is, if you capture your actions in one place and you check them regularly, you can forget about them to some degree. You don’t have to hold them in your head. When you scan through the list, you will know which ones are urgent and which ones can wait. You can trust that you will never forget about them, because you have a system to always check them. I often find that when I go through my list, some of the old actions are no longer even required, or have been done by someone else! So, don’t stress too much if the list it huge. Some actions seem to go away all by themselves!
In summary, feeling overwhelmed as a project manager is quite normal and probably not a reflection on you. Try and bear this in mind and take comfort in the knowledge that you are not alone, and this period will pass. Don’t try and stay on top of everything by working ridiculous hours. Focus on the things that will make a difference. The high leverage activities. If you are not sure what these are, then the place to start is your project plan. What milestones are at risk of slipping? Start there.
Project Manaverse 