I occasionally get asked questions about how I organize my work. For me, one important facet of that is having some idea of where my time is committed. To that end, for several years I’ve maintained a super-simple Google doc that helps me to track time commitments. Here’s a peek at what the table of contents looks like:
A few things to note:
I leverage headers so I can auto-(re)generate a table of contents at the top for an at-a-glance idea of total time (over-)commitment. For “Things I’m Doing”: I try to give a reasonably-accurate estimate of what % of my time each item takes. I also try to keep it (roughly) stack-ranked in order of priority (Note: I’m talking about my priority, which is mostly - but not strictly - aligned with Business Priority.) For “Things I Could/Should/Want to Be Doing”: when/if I start doing them, I “promote” them to “Things I’m Doing”, assign an appropriate time %, and refresh the ToC. Likewise, when I stop doing a thing I “demote” it to “Things I’ve Stopped Doing”, add a note about when/why I stopped, and refresh the ToC. I keep a short bullet list of metadata under each Thing I’m Doing - for example “Started bi-weekly mentoring cadence with Jimbo 2020-07-24”, or “Frobulatized the Doinklets on 2020-03-01”. I re-visit this doc a few times a month, spending no more than 15 minutes per visit to tidy things up a bit - re-prioritize, re-jigger time percentages, update the notes (“Re-frobbed the doinks!”), etc.
For me, this document is a super-lightweight way to meet a few specific needs. The obvious one is that it helps me keep track of approximately where I’m spending my time…but also, I can share this with my manager so that he has some high-level idea of what I’m up to. This can be super-helpful for guiding conversations about prioritization. “You’d like me to look into automating doink-frobbing? Well, it looks like I’m already 140% committed, Chief, so if we agree that needs to happen then we need to talk about what gets cut.”
It also acts as persistent storage for bits of information that I would’ve otherwise easily forgotten. I know that may sound super-obvious - that’s the entire point of documents, mmm? - but I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been glad I wrote shit down here in retrospect. “I have to write a promo recommendation for Jimbo…now, when on Earth did he and I first start chatting?”
Anyhow…this is what works for me. Maybe it could work for you, too. :-)