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Happy Monday 🌞

This year, a topic that has been top of mind for me is workload planning. It might not sound overly exciting, but I’m talking about having a reasonable number of things on my to-do list on any given day, as well as working on a reasonable number of projects at once — and that, to me, is very exciting.

That feeling of being overwhelmed with everything, always behind, leaving people waiting for weeks or maybe even months, I hate that feeling. And that was me for a little bit this year. It has been an especially busy year at work with projects and big goals; plus, I’ve been the hiring manager for one role and have been on the hiring team for a few more. Hiring is a huge project so that also added to my plate.

So, what’s the best way to plan out my workload to get things done without carrying over a dozen tasks from one day to the next?

The answer: ruthless prioritization, and I mean ruthless.

This came up on a recent MakeWorkWork episode. During what Habbi dubbed my ‘Shark summer,’ I was hiring for a role, and we had 1,500 applications. I had to juggle replying to hundreds of candidate messages alongside my regular work. This was tough but got easier with time. (And, of course, it got easier when we hired for the role and were back up to a full team.)

Here are some of the things I started doing differently while my workload was heavier. I’ve kept up these habits and activities even though I feel more on top of my work now because they have very helpful benefits.

→ Weekly planning on Sundays

I’ve written about how I use Sundays in a previous newsletter, but the idea is that I take a few moments to reflect on how the previous week went and then use that knowledge and my upcoming calendar to plan out the upcoming week. Sometimes this takes as little as 10 minutes, but it’s always worth it. I’ll review my meetings and plans to make sure they all work, move around tasks so that I don’t have too many things due on one day, and generally review everything to make sure the week seems reasonable.

→ Keep on top of my inbox

Somehow, everything feels worse when my inbox is also overflowing. I have my assistant reviewing emails as I receive a huge number of emails from having an email address many people have, but I still get tons of emails. My assistant creates filters for people who email too often and where unsubscribing hasn’t worked to try and reduce the clutter long-term, and then overall, I just delete emails ruthlessly. I used to reply to every email, but it was clear that that wasn’t sustainable. I’ve since come up with an email reply equation that I use. Overall, my email system is that I try and check email only a few times a day, once as a quick review for anything urgent in the mornings and then another time in the afternoon to get back to as many people as possible.

→ Focus on the top three tasks daily

This was a small but mighty change — I only allow myself to have three top tasks as my priorities on any given day. I previously had multiple first, second, and third priority items. (My task manager, Todoist, allows me to mark those by color so I can easily see top-priority tasks.) Now, I have only one thing in priority one, two, and three. My whole goal every day is to get my first priority task done, and then, if that goes well, get my second priority task done and then my third priority task. Everything else is optional. I focus on the top three, and this has helped reduce the number of things on my to-do list and make the days feel less overwhelming.

→ Keep one list of projects and priorities

I realized that I’m great at weekly and daily planning for my tasks, but I didn’t have one place where I could quickly glimpse my priorities and projects. We have a big list of priorities for our entire team, but I wanted something more focused on what I was working on, and that connected my projects to my priorities. This way, I can make sure I’m working towards what truly needs to be done rather than getting caught up in something that might not work towards a larger goal. My solution here was a page in Notion that displays a database of my priorities and a database of my projects. The two are connected — every project should be aligned to a priority; otherwise, why am I working on it?

→ Say no early and often

Finally, you can’t ruthlessly prioritize if you have a million ongoing projects and commitments. I needed to say no. I said no to every podcast interview request I got during my especially busy period (even though some of them were amazing). I said no to new projects that weren’t essential for working towards my goals, and I questioned recurring meetings to make sure I was saying no to too many meetings on my calendar. During the recent MakeWorkWork episode, Habbi asked me how I said no to people, and my response was, “I just say no.” I used to agonize over turning people down, but I’ve done it so many times now that it becomes easier with practice.

I recently came across this quote from James Clear that really aligns with this overall way of thinking:

“Be ruthless about what you ignore. Time, energy, and resources are so precious. You have to be ferocious about cutting your priorities—more than you realize and certainly more than is comfortable. You can only deeply commit to a few things. One or two? Maybe three? Every pretty good, sorta nice, kinda fun thing you abandon is like shedding a weighted vest that lets you move at top speed. You were so busy focusing on how much you could carry, you never realized you could run this fast.” - James Clear​

A few months ago, I got some great suggestions from others via Twitter and LinkedIn on this same topic. Here are some of my favorites:

​Mike San Roman:

Have you tried the 3-3-3 method?

• Three hours to work on your most important project.
• Three shorter (but urgent) tasks.
• Three “maintenance” tasks (email, chores, self-improvement, etc.).

​David Spinks:

something that’s been helping me recently:

taking the first 30 minutes every Monday to plan out what I’m going to do each day of the week

​Brittany Berger:

One thing that helps me plan mindfully is tracking my “accuracy score” - I enter how many tasks I planned for the day, and how many got done, and there’s a Notion formula to calculate the accuracy percentage. I find it helps in 2 ways…

First of all, my dopamine hungry brain wants to get a 100% so the mere existence of the fields makes me plan more mindfully and think “will I really be able to do all this?”

And second, I can look at the average number of tasks I actually get done per day & plan accordingly

​Tracey Rawlinson:

This may sound counter-productive, but write yourself a ‘not-to-to list.’ There’s something really empowering about giving yourself permission not to do everything that helps plan your workload better. It really works!

​Selina Studer:

Ever tried writing down every „To Do“ you can think of to get your mind free and then prioritized as follows:

(Mark in color)

1. MUSTs

(high impact/consequence, must be done today)

2. CANs

(important but there’s still some time, can be done within a week)

3. WANTs

(self-made-up-tasks, can be done anytime but would be nice to get them out of the way)

The MUSTs can’t exceed 3-4 tasks per day (or whatever number feels right to you) and starting with the hardest one helps me remain focused. Like that we can work on the same list every day prioritizing the tasks based on current priorities and needs.

​Tammy Bjelland:

I use what I call a “time budget“—it’s a not very pretty or sophisticated google sheet that tells me how much time there is left in the day vs how much work I have left to do (measured in time)

I hope you have a lovely week ahead. As always, feel free to reply if this sparks any thoughts or questions.

See you next week,

Hailley

P.S.: For next week’s newsletter, I’m thinking of getting into the specifics of how I spent my time every day. Let me know if you’re interested or have any questions about my schedule!

• Here’s a simple system I use for saving bookmarks of things I find around the internet in Notion.
• I wrote about how Buffer is a fully remote and distributed company, but we aren’t async-first. Here’s why.
• We’re hiring a Design Engineer on the Marketing team at Buffer — please check it out or spread the word!

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