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Scheduling Work Requests

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For shorter projects, I usually work straight through until I'm done. For longer projects, I usually need to break the time into chunks, commonly referred to as work iterations.

Breaking projects into month-long work iterations seems to work best for me. I find that anything shorter than this results in too much planning and not enough working. I also find that anything longer than this gives fewer opportunities to make mid-course corrections or step back to learn from successes and mistakes.

Prior to beginning each work iteration, I need to determine how much time I have available to complete the work. I simply pull out a calendar to note holidays, known time-off periods, mandatory meetings and training, and the like. Then I take from that a random-work factor - such as 30% - to allow for things such as processing e-mail, unforeseen research, fit-and-finish work, an occasional unplanned drop-everything event, and similar.

Once I know how many hours I have available, I try to first carve off the highest-priority undone work requests. Working on too many high priorities at once can lead to burnout, so I also try to leave room for a few lower-priority, fast-to-complete work requests to boost confidence.

In my last post of this series, I will discuss how I track work requests to increase my efficiency.

-- Paul

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