Jump to Comments

Once or twice a year, the same thing happens to me. Suddenly, unexpectedly, I feel overwhelmed with simply too many different things to do. It’s hard to juggle a lot of unrelated balls, and I inevitably let a couple fall at the beginning, before I finally re-learn what I learnt the last time this happened, and juggle the balls effectively again. Once that’s done, I feel efficient, happy, on top of things.

Why do I have to re-learn it all over again each time? Each set of balls is different, but I think in this case it’s simply a failure of paying attention to my own failures and learnings. I’ve already successfully juggled “too many balls” a number of times, and each time I applied pretty much the same method.

Part of the problem when you get overwhelmed is that you feel stressed, and you don’t think clearly anymore. That may explain why I don’t automatically recall what I did last time, when this happens. So, in the hopes of helping the many future stressed me’s, and the many stressed you’s out there, here’s my way to keep on juggling when life and work (they always seem to do it in concert) throw you another half-dozen balls.

The Problem

Image via Wikipedia

Many books and articles on productivity preach that multi-tasking hurts productivity. I don’t disagree with them. However, when one is faced with many tasks that are all important and urgent, some of which have distant horizons, single-tasking can be deadly. You start work in the morning, entirely focused on building a new piece of functionality or writing a business plan, and you finish late at night, having done all or a part of the task. You feel satisfied, proud of yourself, having worked your socks off and made some solid headway against a big task.

But what about all those other things you were supposed to do? Whether in the back of your mind or on a task list, they’re still there, nagging at you, and quickly replace that feeling of satisfaction with one of stress: I worked hard all day and still there are so many things to do! Even worse, you may not have completely finished the big, high-priority task, so even though you worked all day, you didn’t even cross a single thing off your task list.

This has a bad tendency to snowball into feeling stressed all day, and eventually even the big task during the day doesn’t get done very well. After all, it’s hard to focus on one thing when you know there are 10 other things that really need to be done waiting for you on the todo list.

The problem compounds itself when your tasks have different priorities, and when there is some potential for batching things together. “Batch similar tasks together!” say many productivity gurus, and this does work when you’re not completely overwhelmed and just trying to save some time. But the problem is, 5 small, non-urgent tasks batched together still don’t feel as high priority as one really important task. But when you let them slip week after week, those 5 little tasks multiply as more similar tasks slip into the batch. All too quickly, you have a monster that will take you 4+ hours to work through. So suddenly you have a lot of big, lengthy tasks, all creeping up the priority ladder simultaneously. This creates stress, a lot of it.

De-batching: Multi-single-tasking

Here’s the method then: de-batch your tasks. You have a business plan to write? Don’t look at it as one single big task to be done in one go: split it into researching, thinking, planning, writing each section. You have 50 support tickets to go through? Go through them one by one. Yes, at first, it multiplies the number of things that “you have to do”, but it allows you to do them a tiny little bit at a time.

The next step is to de-batch your day, so to speak. Split your day into chunks. I use 30-minute chunks. A Mac application called FlexTime allows me to set up a 30-minute routine of 25 minutes of work + 5 minutes of rest that repeats itself endlessly throughout the day. Use whatever method and slot lengthy suits you best for splitting up your day.

So, now that you have a load of tasks and a bunch of time slots, start allocating small sets of tasks (usually fitting into a single theme) into each time slot. 25 minutes should allow you to process 10-20 support tickets. It should allow you to write part of a blog post (I’m still within my slot, at the moment). Whatever you do in your time slot, stick to it. Cut off all distractions and don’t multi-task, just do one thing at a time - but do it for only 25 minutes. When the slot is over, leave things in whatever state they are and move on to the next set of tasks, no matter how much you may feel like continuing. If you don’t stick to that discipline you’ll end up with the same problem again.

The Result

For the first day or two, it will feel like you’re not making any progress on the big important tasks, because you’re not getting that much completely finished in those time slots. But actually, what start to happen after even just a couple of days of this is that those many things you started start to finish, little by little. Not only that, but since a lot of the tasks on your list are likely to be short, you will actually finish a lot of things that had been nagging you, and your task list will clear up little by little.

Because you keep on switching, you don’t feel so stressed about all the stuff you’re ignoring, because you’re not ignoring nearly as much. Soon, you find yourself finishing a whole lot of stuff in one day. When you do that, it feels great. Your 25-minute slots start to feel very good and productive, and you get even more done in them.
When that happens, you’ll feel on top of things, and you are - but at that point, it’s important not to stop following this method, or else you’ll soon fall back into the stressed out pattern you were in just before. It takes discipline to take a break during a task you enjoy, but do it. In fact, my time slot just ended here, so I’m going to take a break and finish this post later.

It’s now two days later, and here I am again, finishing up this blog post. Before closing this article, I wanted to add a few points and a summary.

• Do take breaks seriously. Resting for 10 minutes out of every hour is not a significant drain on productivity. In fact, if you don’t take those breaks yourself, your brain will take them for you by making you more distracted and less creative.
• Another advantage of the breaks is they force you to change tasks. If you ignore the breaks, your natural tendency will be to continue doing the same thing for the next slot, and the next, and the next… so take the breaks!
• It’s very important to cut out distractions while you’re focusing on one thing, or else you won’t be able to get enough done in those 25 minutes. Shut down chat, email, etc. If you’re in an office, put headphones on and be firm when people interrupt you (“Hey, do you have a minute?” “I’m in the middle of something. Is this urgent?”).

Conclusion

Next time you’re feeling overwhelmed by having to do too many things at once, remember this trick to get on top of it:

• De-batch the tasks
• De-batch your day
• Deal with many tasks in a day, always one at a time
• Make sure you get some amount of rest each hour to remain productive
• Ensure you are 100% focused on the one task that you’re doing for the allocated time, then take your break and move on to 100% on next task

I hope you find this useful. Any comments will, as ever, be most welcome, particularly if you have done something similar or different to deal with this sort of situation and are willing to share your experience. Thanks for reading!