Work Faster Without Stress
One of the main issues we all have to deal on a daily basis is a stressful work life. Well, it doesn’t have to be.
How often do you find yourself completely overwhelmed at work, before you even got the chance to actually do something productive? For me it used to be within the first hour of work day. I honestly did prepare a list of most important things I just HAD TO DO the next day, and was all set up to do them. It’s just when you get to work, even if you do manage to start by your list, you almost never finish up EVERYTHING on that list by the end of the day. As a result, you could of completed 10 – 20 very important things that day, but you still didn’t do what you so carefully planned the day before. For me – it killed all the feeling of fulfillment at the end of the day.
No matter how hard you work, you never get it all done!
Since project management was a major part of my occupation, I notices other team members, team leads and especially managers that seemed to be experiencing at least some form of work related stress. It bothered me, and I decided to think about a possible solution to the problem.
Granter, eliminating work related stress completely might not be realistic, but certain points came to mind that promised to improve the situation tremendously.
Let me ask you this: how many ‘items’ do you usually plan to do the next day? 5? 10? 20? (I hope not more than that)
And how many you actually get done FROM THAT SAME LIST? And how many other tasks just creep in during the work day? Granted, business priorities can sometime change on a very short notice, but really?.. do they change that often that what was important to the business goals today is irrelevant tomorrow?
There is a special dynamic that takes place in the work environment, especially one based on projects based matrix. Each project owners/managers has interest to promote his own agenda, their own project. So, how dedicated can you be to your, just freshly pressed to-do list for the day, when colleague from all over come and try to further their agenda with just this tiny little thing they need from you TODAY!?
But even that is not the problem, you can eventually learn to say no to all and stick to your guns with complete disregard to your colleague, maybe even friend’s requests. I would guess team work will be somewhat damaged in this case, but hey, you got to survive somehow right? Otherwise you will never finish that project your boss just asked about yesterday, and when do you even get the time to start working on the new one coming in next week?
Feel a bit overwhelmed?
Now, picture this:
You come to work tomorrow, and you only have THREE THINGS TO DO, yes only 3 things. And you’re done with your duties for the day. Then, if you still feel like it, you can volunteer to another assignment, if you like.. and you will like. You see, it’s a great feeling to know that what is expected of us equals our desire to invest to meet those expectations. Maybe it’s our inner child’s reaction, similar to that feeling we had when we finished our homework and it was time to play!
The trick is to really pick only three things (tasks, items, whatever) we want to do today. You can do this in the morning when you come to work, or the night before (even better).
Now, you come to work, open you task management software and you see… ONLY 3 THINGS TO DO. That’s it! When you done with these 3, you can choose another 3, but no more than 9 during a work day (if your work is mostly short time tasks, you might be more comfortable with 9. We don’t want you to have nothing to do at 11:00am.
What that gives you? A CLEAR HEAD. You now don’t have to worry about the next 200 things you have on your table. Feels better doesn’t it?
HappyTodo’s implements just that. You still get lots of control over what you choose to do, and you also get the help of a very smart algorithm that gives you a list of top 9 tasks from your to-do list, sorted by their importance based on each task’s priority, due date and overall project importance. Over these suggestions you can tweak the list with your own, human input.
