How To Handle A Heavy Workload More Efficiently

You’ve got a ton of tasks piling up and quite frankly you’re getting a bit stressed.

First of all, take a moment, have a coffee and relax.

Then it’s time to take action and I’ll show you how…

The single best way to get through your workload

This is something I picked up from Rich Schefren when I was over in the states.

It’s an absolute corker of common sense, but it’s one of those ideas that you figure for obvious and never actually think about.

It’s a shame, because it can really work.

OK. Lets say you’ve got three tasks – this works with as many as you like, but because I’m not such a whizz on Windows Paint I’ve used three for my diagrams (that’s right, diagrams!)

Once complete, your three tasks will all earn you or your company money. So getting them done is pretty darn important.

By the way, we’ll call the tasks A, B and C.

So, your usual approach is that you work on each as best you can, doing a bit on A, a bit on B, and a bit on C.

It’s stressful, your mind is all over the place, but at least the tasks are being done and by the start of the fourth week working on the three tasks, you’re done. Hurrah! The money comes in.

That process would look something like this…

You can see that by a third way through week 3 task A is complete, two thirds of the week task B is complete and by the end of week 3 task C is complete.

Following that process, you don’t start earning any money until a third way through week 3.

Not the best situation, right?

You can probably already see by looking at the above diagram what’s going wrong here.

By trying to work on all three tasks at once, you’re not only getting stressed, you’re not just losing your mind…

You’re losing money.

Because look what happens when you change up the process and tackle one task at a time…

What a difference!

You complete task A by the end of the first week. For two weeks it’s making you money.

You complete task B by the end of the second week. For one week it’s making you money.

You complete task C by the end of the third week which is exactly when you finished it in the original process so you haven’t lost anything.

It works but you must re-wire your mindset

This simple change of working practice can have a massive influence on you but I’ll be honest – it’s hard.

You see chances are you’re hardwired into working in a certain way and for that first week while tasks B and C aren’t being touched, you’ll be getting nervous.

Not to mention your boss will be pacing up and down wondering what on earth you’re doing.

Despite the clear logic behind it, the more efficient method just feels wrong in practice.

As much as I try to stick to it, just yesterday I was getting in a huff because I had too many things going on at once.

So take this on board and try to put it into practice, but don’t beat yourself up for not being able to shift immediately into the new process – you need to gradually re-wire your mindset.

Once you have though, you’ll be able to handle heavy workloads so much more efficiently…

And make a lot more money!

Category: Business Success