I caught up with a friend today who outlined something we all probably have been caught up in: someone comes over, out of the blue, and goes "hey, can you do this please?" Sometimes not even so politely as that.
In Agile, there's this idea that everyone who has bought into the framework/principle accepts that you make a plan, and then if later someone comes and tries to modify the plan, you have lee-way to say "yes, I can take on this unplanned work, but you need to tell me what planned work I must drop."
Agile aside, I feel this is something that should be extended further.
Ideally, you need to build the mindset of "I can only do so much" into the pre-agreements amongst all departments. Anybody who's been in corporate knows that such pre-agreement is usually impossible.
But consider you are a lone operative. You might have often come up against requirements that come in left of field, and you need to process them. The false action is to just add them to you queue, and maybe prioritize, with or without input from your management. That is, in the long run, untenable.
Your first port of call needs to be: "here are the urgent things I have on. What should I drop?" The person requesting your activity will probably not know. Or, they will say only "well my thing is really important, so fit it in."
Next port of call is your team lead or manager. They are supposed to have the bigger picture - it's within their responsibilities. So ask them: "what should I drop?" They might tell you to drop the new request. They might tell you to drop something you are already working on. They might struggle to find something to drop. That's OK, that happens. The question then needs to bubble up the chain of management.
No matter. You cannot deliver all things in one period - otherwise you were under-assigned, and that is not a usual likelihood.
In my work, I have tried this past quarter to make sure people who were assigned tasks can focus on those. I self-assigned the responsibility to personally take on any left-field new request. This has worked OK-ish, but with many requirements on my team we were stretched. I would like to build in more slack next time, but this time round, I was in fact able to shield the team a lot from unplanned requirements.
Remember that you are human: that your work, and you personally, deserve respect. For any new item coming in, something else must be dropped. If you do not have discretion on that front, ask someone else to make the call.
Another way of more pointedly saying it is: "who can we risk to disappoint right now?"
If you're in good company, they have an answer for that. If not, and they repeatedly take the stance of "Just fit it in," find a job where you're not surrounded by idiots.
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