Overwhelmed? Try this! - Part 2 - One-task-at-a-time

In this series, I describe all of the different methodologies I employ and encourage others to try to feel less burnt out, more focused and ultimately feel better during their working day. Most of these are also job-agnostic so non-technical people - feel free to read on!

What?

The phrase "I am a natural multitasker" or "I just juggle stuff all day" goes straight through me. If you're a person who says this, I can say with relative certainty that you may do some tasks concurrently, but you do none of them well. It sounds insane for me, a serial single tasker to say this now but you can only do one thing at a time.

Why?

As you climb up the seniority ladder you will ultimately be leaned on more for your expertise, guidance and if you're technical, debugging. More distractions, more people, more demand = evitable context switching. You open Slack/Teams or whatever IM client in the morning and you're presented with a Christmas tree of chatter; it happens (*there's stuff as an organisation you can do to mitigate this - more on that later...) - or if you're still working in the 90s, you're inbox is full of "demanding" emails.

So, why is it bad to rifle through all of these as fast as possible, context-switching as much as possible because the Christmas tree lights need to be individually turned off?

Well here's why:

1. You will miss important contextual details on your road to mark things as read
2. You will forget about that "5 minute thing" you said you'd do "soon"
3. You will overcommit to stuff you don't have time for

So what can you do?:

1. Spend X amount of time (usually minutes prioritising) - For this I have a personal task backlog which is constructed and reprioritised throughout the day. Those familiar with Agile should be familiar with a backlog and also familiar that personal backlog items belong nowhere near the Product backlog. For those not familiar, in simple terms, it's a list in which the order of importance can change dependant on demands.
2. Once prioritised - I determine the steps to completion for the task. A task is not always immediately and solely achievable; sometimes it involves collecting people or third parties and arranging dedicated sessions.
3. I "complete" that task and that task ONLY - that task may be completed by scheduling a meeting, emailing a third party or dealing with an issue immediately and solely by me. Either way; a task completion is a path forward, or a direct resolution.
4. I move onto my next task, in priority order.

I have scheduled appointments set with myself for personal backlog repriorisation throughout the day.

Doing the above means I suffer less from context-switching, over-promising and I make sure that my focus is 100% on the task I am working on.