Workload tracking?

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Posted by Larry Kollar
Oct 20, 2017 at 11:07 PM

In the last six weeks, my workload went from “fairly light” to “OMGWTF.” Until this week, stuff was piling in faster than I could get it out, and I can bang out the work when I’ve got it lined up. I usually keep to-do stuff in my outliner (Tines, running under Cygwin), and it accidentally turned into a Kanban-style setup—active work items, backlog, and completed.

The part that makes it all work, more than what software I’m using, is blocking out an hour of time on Friday afternoons to do my weekly report (which involves looking at the checked-off items in Tines) and plan what I’m going to do next week (picking stuff out of the backlog). It’s almost like a personal sprint.

This got me wondering… what kinds of secret sauce have you guys come up with (or accidentally stumbled into) to help you keep track of a heavy workload?

Posted by Paul Korm
Oct 21, 2017 at 05:56 PM

The best “secret sauce” in my opinion is the David Allen advice to have an inbox, record anything that comes to mind there, and forget it as soon as you’ve recorded it. There’s lot’s of ways to have an “inbox”—the point is if your mind is heavily focused on work then don’t try to clutter it even more with trying to keep track of new tasks as they come in.

I attend a lot of client meetings where I pick up new tasks. I take handwritten notes in a journal, and have my personal “bullet-journal” style of notating tasks that I need to put into my inbox.

At close of work each evening I process the inbox and assign priorities, start / due dates,and estimated duration. I happen to use OmniFocus on Mac because I’ve stuck with it for years, it has a deep memory of near-term and long term projects, and I don’t want to switch. And it has my inbox.

In times of low demand I play around with other task planners—Andy Brice’s HyperPlan is a good choice for kanban-ish planning if that’s your thing. But I’ve stuck with the method kit I use for years because it works and as a self-employed person I I fear I’d start losing time and money if I made a major change.

Posted by Jeffery Smith
Oct 22, 2017 at 12:27 AM

I agree that GTD is the way to handle a workload without anything falling between the cracks. When I was a college administrator, I used GTD to get time sensitive things completed. It won’t do anything to get the people below you or above you to follow suit, unfortunately. And it even got me annoyed that paperwork I processed and sent on to the next level often died in an inbox until it was moot.

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