Ever feel like you’re working so hard, but you just can’t make any headway? You’re running around, going to meetings, unblocking your team, facilitating communication, writing tons of code (kudos if you still can, by the way), but you always feel like you’re struggling to stay afloat? Like there’s always too much to do and you can’t catch your breath?
Maybe you’re even doing important work. Maybe you feel like you can’t stop because if you did, everything would fall apart.
Maybe it would.
I think this problem is most keenly felt by leads or other folks who do glue work. Fortunately, there’s light at the end of the tunnel. Unfortunately, there may be some pain along the way.
Thinking in abstract
Let’s zoom out for a bit and think about the problem in abstract. Imagine pouring water into a funnel.
The water is your workload. It comes in at a certain rate. It may ebb and flow, but the funnel can handle that to a certain extent.
The funnel itself is you. The big end is your capacity to handle that incoming work. The small end is your bandwidth. For the purposes of this article, we’ll focus on the small end.
When you pour too much water into that funnel too fast, you spill and make a mess. The same is true at work. If your incoming work is too much, you’re not going to be able to do everything. You’ll miss things, and you’ll make a mess—whatever that means in the context you’re working in.
We can break this problem down into two parts:
- Your bandwidth (how much time you have to work; the small end of the funnel)
- Your workload (all the things you have to do; the water)
Ultimately, what you’re experiencing is a resource constraint. Your funnel can only be so big. You only have so much time to work. There are two levers you can pull:
- Increase bandwidth
- Decrease workload
Not all of these methods I outline below work in every situation, but I hope you find some useful ideas.
Increase bandwidth
Before we go any further, I want to make one thing clear: Don’t overwork yourself. If you’re already plugging 40 hours a week, don’t do more. (As in all things, that statement comes with exceptions. In some cases, it may make sense to plug more hours in as long as you have a plan to stop. Working more hours should only ever be a temporary solution as you actively work to reduce your workload, and it should happen very infrequently. If ever.)
That said, one solution could be to to apply more person-hours. They just don’t have to be yours.
Note: This assumes there are more people you can assign to solve the problems you are. Methods to increase bandwidth are meaningless if there’s nobody else you can rope into the work to spread it out. If that’s the case, you may need to find a way to make this pain felt by those who can solve it.
Parallelize work
One way you can increase the bandwidth on the problems you’re solving is to get more bodies in the water rescuing those babies. Maybe this means taking a step back to break the work down (and write tickets) in such a way that it can be done by multiple people at a time.
There’s probably more I could write about here, but how you parallelize the work is very dependent on the project and your team structure.
Rotate responsibilities
Another way to increase bandwidth is to set up a rotation of responsibilities. If there’s one task in particular that’s a real time-suck, assign it to a rotation. Treat it like an on-call rotation.
I was once on a platform team. We built and maintained tools for application teams. These teams would ping us for support in Slack. At first, whoever saw the question in Slack first would answer it, but after a while, only a few of us ever took those requests. This meant those few of us got little else done.
My team lead saw this and set up a support rotation. Every week, one person would be designated to take those support requests.
Now one of those things that made me run around feeling unproductive was only on my plate periodically, and we could plan for it. It was sustainable.
There is one important caveat here: No less time was spent doing the task. Overall, the team still spent (about) the same number of person-hours on support. The benefit gained here was that the time was spread out, and no one person was drowning from it.
Decrease workload
Say no
There are some things you just have to say no to.
Prioritize
If your workload or responsibilities are determined by somebody else, this is especially effective. Treat it like a card sorting exercise so everything can’t have the same priority. Write out your priorities in an ordered list.
Automate
If your workload is full of redundant tasks and you aren’t already automating them, automate those suckers! You’ll want to avoid premature automation, of course, but if you’ll save time by writing a script, do it. 🤷♂
Need I say more?
Go upstream
This one is my favorite. Identify and solve the root cause of the thrash you’re experiencing.