Smithology

Right now at work I have a million things to do. It seems like I get phone calls, emails and people coming to my desk all the time with more work to do. Mostly it is just things that are annoying people, other times it is planned work that needs to happen on a deadline.

So my method works like this. I first try and work out all my deadlines. What has to be done by when and why. Then for those items I can work out tasks that need to be done etc to make it all happen. Then I can schedule my time and get the work done or alert my boss if I think it’s not going to happen.

But then I get into the phase where I am now where pretty much all my deadlines came and went and I have a bunch of projects on the boil and things stacking up. We’ve got two new programmers in the pipeline who’ll be on the job soon enough so this is how I’m getting through stuff.

1. I work in half day blocks on a problem.
2. When someone comes and sees me, I tell them that I’ll look at it after lunch or tomorrow if it’s already the afternoon – most people are happy with that.
3. When it gets to after lunch or the next morning, I work on the most recent task I was bugged about.
4. Then the process repeats.
5. If by some miracle, no-one bugs me, I take a look at my top ten issues in my pile (actually it’s the bug tracking system) and pick the one that seems to have the most impact.

So the lesson is – bug me just before lunch or right when I’m about to go home. Maybe I should make a cut-off to avoid rewarding people who call at inconvenient times.

[tags]productivity, fire fighting, time management[/tags]