Dealing with lots going on at work: how to get organised

Some weeks I feel quite content because I don't have lots of things going on. I may have big things but not a long list of stuff and I don't like long lists...

It's when my to do list becomes the length of the weekly shopping list that I become panicky and I don't know what thing to do first. I get mentally overloaded by everything I need to do so I sometimes ignore things, hoping they'll magically go away. I end up burying my head in the sand because I am so overwhelmed by what I have in front of me. When deadlines approach, my utter hatred of failure and messing up puts me into overdrive and I meticulously work through the most urgent of items at the last hour.

But this approach put a lot of stress on me. I find that it triggers migraines and makes things all the more unproductive. I don't like it so I do what I can to avoid things stacking up in the first place. I believe that prevention is the best way to avoid a lot of the autistic meltdown/shut down reactions, if that is at all possible!

Yesterday I felt like it was getting too much at work. I had tasks coming in from one manager and another lot from another manager. All the tasks felt urgent and my head was swimming with so much to do and not a lot of clarity. So I decided I would be methodical and spend a bit of time to work out what I had to do so I could work with a bold aim in mind.

I use Microsoft Outlook for my work e-mail and I use the flag tool (follow-up) to help me identify work I have been given and I can set myself a reminder attached to the e-mail so that Outlook automatically reminds me when things need to be done. The idea is that e-mails can be "flagged" with reminders and I can colour code them with categories as well based on the type of work I have been set for my categories (also brilliant in highlighting events in my calendar). Microsoft have helpfully provided web pages to show us how to use the follow-up tool in Microsoft Outlook and how to use colour categories in Microsoft Outlook. The follow-up tool then builds a to-do list and marks what needs to be looked at in order of the dates I have set for reminders. This then helps me see at a glance what I need to do first and I can work through things in order and add to it as new things come in.

I try to keep the to do list short or the sheer length of it makes my brain hurt. I remember from my web design days of reading about the psychology of web design. The idea was that the human brain rarely can process more than seven things at a time so a website with a menu of over seven items will be hard for the end user to browse through. I take the same design concepts into my lists. Its why I have to scan each item of the shopping list to find the item to check it off since I can't easily glance at the whole thing (where it is long) and see an item quickly. Its important that my to do lists don't grow to unmanageable lengths. So my list is a reminder to me to keep flagging my e-mails so I remember to go back to them and so things aren't lost. I ensure I keep my task list not too long or else it will make me overwhelmed and I will run away until I come back with fresh and less stressed eyes.

There's often talk about reasonable adjustments and the onus being on the employer to provide the support and workplace chances but I believe we need to also help ourselves if they aren't suggesting the right things. The one way is to maximise the benefits of the tools we might already have in our workplace.

As a former ICT lecturer and IT trainer, I think that not enough time is given to staff to learn how to use their computing tools. It is assumed that we somehow just figure it out on our own. We don't. If we don't know a function is there, we won't be magically looking for it unless we have that curious disposition. Many IT users are scared of doing something wrong. Its understandable.

I have trained people to organise their e-mails so they automatically go into different folders based on the contents and who its come from. At the end of the session I see real impact to these IT users because they are no longer faced with such an unmanageable wall of information but that it is sifted by topics and senders automatically into clearly labelled folders. It reduces the stress and helps aid productivity.

I know that creating e-mail sorting rules in Microsoft Outlook or flagging and categorising isn't the only solution to information overload but its a start, right?

Reference:

McCracken, DD. & Wolfe, RJ., (2003) User-centered Website Development: A Human-Computer Interaction Approach, Prentice Hall