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Career Management

I recently moved into a new role at work. This new role is much more complex than my previous one in terms of the sheer volume of moving pieces that I'll be dealing with and managing. I now have considerably more deliverables than I used to, both internally, externally, and my own personal development commitments. The deliverables are a mix of weekly, monthly, quarterly, half, and annual deliverables.

Right now my head is spinning trying to track progress on each deliverable and ultimately answering the "what should I be working on right now" question based on the due date and priority of the various deliverables. Admittedly, the situation is compounded due to my being new to role and not yet at the level of efficiency that I ultimately need to get to.

So my question is, has anyone found any tools or programs that help you manage your personal tasks and priorities? I've thought about using MS Project, and I may end up going that route, but I'm curious what ideas others in this community have.

Thanks!

Jason

craig_john_harris's picture
Submitted by craig_john_harris on Monday August 24th, 2009 4:12 am

Sounds like you need GTD (http://www.davidco.com/what_is_gtd.php)

Craig

dennis_sherman's picture
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Submitted by dennis_sherman on Monday August 24th, 2009 9:42 am

Agree, 100%. 

And be careful about tool seduction.  GTD is about process and mindset, not the tools you use.  A fully analog (paper) implementation is highly effective for many people.  There are many electronic implementations possible, I use Outlook with no add-ons.  Read some of the many blogs on GTD, then jump in with the lowest-tech solution you can stand to use.  You'll figure out where you need higher-tech support.

--
Dennis Sherman
6-1-2-7

stringl's picture
Submitted by stringl on Monday August 24th, 2009 3:36 pm

I work as a consultant, and the role includes a varying mix of billable project work, sales work, managing a few people, some longer-term internal initiatives, and other ad-hoc tasks. To date, I've found no single tool that copes with the lot. Particularly because my technical needs vary. Sometimes I'm on the road a lot, sometimes on a client's site with no network access, and sometimes at my PC most of the time, so the tools that work in one scenario don't work in others.

For my own time and tasks, I (try to) do three things:

  1. I figure out how much time I need to / have available to spend on my different responsibilities, and plan it on my Outlook calendar. Generally I do this once per week, which allows me to step back a little and figure out how the different priorities balance. For anything I need to do regularly, such as project related admin tasks, I put time for that on the calendar. I find this easier than adding them to a to-do list. Similarly, if I have a one-off task of some size due - particularly of the important-but-not-urgent variety - I plan it in well ahead, when I can.
  2. I keep a to-do list of imminent tasks in my notebook. As I run through the week I also note additional actions. At the end of the week, I create an updated to-do list on a new page. For me, the ritual of writing out the not-done ones helps. It forces me to run through things. Plus if I've done it for the same task several weeks running, I either simply decide I'll never do the task and leave it off the list, or I actually do it. This is where I find I don't have the discipline to delete things from Outlook or similar.
  3. I keep a wish-list of other things I need to in OneNote.

I've tried a handful of task-management tools, and found that Outlook is reasonable enough. But there are too many times when I'm not at my PC, so I keep returning to pen and paper. I also loved Things on my iPhone (http://culturedcode.com/things/iphone/) as it works exactly as I want it to. I suspect that if I had a mac, and could therefore buy the mac version of this, I'd be sorted. As I don't, I keep returning to pen and paper.

Obviously, if I'm actually managing a project of any size, I tend to use MS-Project. This allows me to track everyone's tasks and deadlines.

The GTD advice above is good. I'd also suggest listening to http://www.manager-tools.com/2006/05/time-management. This is what made me use my calendar so much, and it's made me prioritise things much more effectively.

Good luck,

S

 

jclishe's picture
Submitted by jclishe on Monday August 24th, 2009 11:05 pm

Thanks for the great suggestions guys.

In hindsight I should have provided more details about my background in my original post. I'm very familiar with GTD. First read the book about 6 years ago and have implemented a slightly customized version of it that I've been following religiously in the years since. GTD and Marcus Buckingham's Strong Week Plan is essentially what my personal workflow is modelled after. I have a weekly review on Friday which takes 2 - 3 hours to get through, and one of the things I do during that time is carve out personal time on my calendar the following week to focus  on the various projects and tasks that I need to work on.

Stringl, my background is very similar to yours. I spent 14 years as a billable consultant, and while I'm not in a billable role now, my working environment is still very similar to the consultant lifestyle. On any given day I could be working from home, from my office, from a client site, from a hotel, or from a restauraunt over dinner when I'm travelling. Just today I had 2 very long customer meetings and wasn't able to actually get online until I went out to dinner with my laptop. Obviously I don't want to spend all night catching up on email at a restauraunt so I need to maximize the effectiveness of the times that I'm online, because my schedule may not allow for me to be online again, besides for my Windows Mobile phone, for awhile. So I've tweaked my time management / personal workflow system over the years to accomodate my workstyle, and I must say that my overall GTD-modified system works extremely well.

But here's the problem. We all know that time management and project management are 2 completely seperate things, and to be frank, I've never felt that GTD addressed projects very well (by "projects" I simply mean personal deliverables that I own that are comprised of many tasks. I'm not referring to formal projects with a team and PM). In the past during my weekly reviews I would scan all of the projects / deliverables that I had on my plate, and make sure that I was carving out time the following week to work on them. But my current issue is that in my new role, the amount of deliverables that I own and that are due on a weekly, monthly, quartlery, bi-annual, and annual basis has multiplied significantly and I don't have a great way to track next actions and progress on any of them. I'm using a combination of OneNote and Outlook, and it's working, but there is a lot of room for improvement. What I'm ultimately looking for is a "Personal Project Dashboard / Scorecard" that can show me, on a single screen, the status of all of my deliverables and help me make decisions during my weekly review about what I need to work on next week.

Awhile back I found a small shareware app that did this. The concept was great but the actual app was still rough around the edges. It was very much like MS Project in concept but it was specifically tailored for an individual to track his/her personal tasks and deliverables in a much more user friendly and less intimidating UI than MS Project. You loaded all of your deliverables into it, their due dates, priorities, estimated work time, and various other pieces of data, and it would basically tell you what you needed to be working on at any given time. It helped to avoid the situation where you're 8 months into the year and only 40% complete on one of your annual commitments. This is the type of tool that I'm looking for now. It would not replace or eliminate any piece of my current workflow, but rather it would complement / augment it. I see this tool as being a part of my weekly review that I would use to help build my Strong Week Plan for the next week.

I had 4 hours in the car to think about this today and I've come up with a framework for tweaking MS Project to do what I'm looking for as a last resort, but I'm still  very interested in finding a tool that's already been developed for this type of scenario.

Jason

 

jclishe's picture
Submitted by jclishe on Tuesday August 25th, 2009 9:51 am

Just found this program, this is exactly what I'm looking for:

http://www.effexis.com/achieve/personal-productivity-software.htm

My only concern is that this company / program appears to be just a lone developer. I'd be concerned about getting too engrained into an app like this, and then it suddenly disappears. I'll probably download the trial anyway, but I would prefer something like this from a more established ISV.

stringl's picture
Submitted by stringl on Tuesday August 25th, 2009 12:57 pm

That looks like a pretty cool program. I'm tempted to download the trial, but I know that if I do, I WILL spend the next few hours playing with it, and not getting anything else done. Also that in a week I'd be back to pen and paper...

Your targetting of this post at high Cs did amuse me, as I only noticed that part of the title after getting all excited about the topic!

jclishe's picture
Submitted by jclishe on Tuesday August 25th, 2009 2:57 pm

LOL. Yeah, well when I have a ton on my plate and I don't have a clear action plan to execute against, I become mentally frozen. I figured that was something that other high-C'ers would appreciate. :)