FAQ: “I don’t have enough time — I have too much work going on, I can’t fit in x, y, z and I have no time to focus. What do I do?”

via undraw.co

A few years ago, Jason Taylor talked about design leadership at Academy Xi. He observed that one of designers’ weakest skill sets is what he categorised as ‘project management’: planning time, prioritising work, scheduling. It stuck with me.

I’ve heard it from others, and I’ve been there myself. Maybe it was because I was working on three product teams, or a lack of clarity on goals. Perhaps I had to improve on self-discipline or prioritisation: I wanted to get involved in too many projects. Maybe I wasn’t saying ‘no’ enough, or I was in a demanding environment where overtime was standard for everyone. Either way, there was more that I could do in all of those scenarios.

My intention with this write-up is to help people (mainly designers) who are prone to saying ‘yes’ to a lot of things, and want to help a lot. These are practical tips to help individuals, rather than addressing any underlying organisational challenges.

Here are some ideas, I would appreciate hearing your feedback: what worked, what didn’t.

Ask for support from your lead

One place to start is talking with your team lead / coach / manager and getting some coaching through it. They can help support by revisiting goals, giving you a fresh set of eyes on everything, and even just hearing you out loud, which can help you process things by framing it to someone else. Together, you can review what’s on your plate, revisit priorities, and see any patterns that you can get help with via coaching.

Whether this is the first thing you do depends on your seniority and whether the company and team vision, goals, and principles have given you enough clarity. The more junior you are, the more guidance you will probably be needed up-front. If you are missing clarity, you won’t be autonomous to prioritise and negotiate on your own and/or with your team.

Use goals to audit and scrutinise everything

Collate the following:

• Personal goals: Presumably you are continuously goal setting with your manager, career coach, mentor, yourself, etc.
• Organisational goals: company goals, product team goals and metrics. (Side note: make sure you are actively contributing to, and challenging the ones that are closest to your team)
• Everything you’re working on — what are all the things on your plate?

Use these goals to assess whether:

1. The size of your personal goals feels right, or if they are too large, and need to be broken down
2. There’s a clear priority between the organisational goals
3. What you’re working on is in line with these goals, or if they fall outside of these (suggesting they need to be deferred / deprioritised / delegated etc.)

You can use a board to track all of this in one place

I use a Trello board to keep track of things, even in my personal life. This is how I approach it:

• Keep a column for your goals and principles, to refer to them as you assess your board.
• Write everything you’re working on. Everything, even if it seems to take 30 mins a week. It still has consequences, whether it be headspace, switching context cost, people’s expectations on you delivering something, and people contacting you as a representative for that.
• You can use labels to mark which work is for which goal. This is always an interesting exercise: am I working on 60% company goals, 10% admin, and 30% just what others are asking me to do, forgetting time for career development, or networking, reflection, etc.?
• I track where I’m waiting on a response from someone too. Why? If I need something from someone, it’s on me to follow them up.

We did this exercise in a research team that was feeling overwhelmed while having low-impact on the customer, and it had great outcomes.

We did this exercise in our research team to filter out anything that wasn’t serving us or the organisation. We realised the team already had a sense of what they wanted to be focussing their time on, and not doing that was hurting their development and impact on the customer. They just needed some guidance to be able to say no.

We said ‘no’ to anything that didn’t fit into these goals. We cut out a lot of work that actually was better suited to other teams. As a team lead, I didn’t have to give answers, because the principles we created together gave us the same direction.

We reflected on the cost of saying ‘yes’, which helped us be more stringent later on. Each time the team said ‘yes’ to something that was not in line with our goals, we were costing ourselves the time to have more strategic impact, and to truly help the organisation be customer-centric. On an individual level, it also meant the team missed out on time for training, and developing skills aligned with career interests.

We talked about how it felt doing work that was not customer-focussed. It became clear the team already subconsciously had some feeling when they were acting against some principles, they just hadn’t defined, agreed, and committed to them as a team, to feel empowered and aligned when they said no.

Prioritise and decide your work in progress limit — like a sprint

• Order things in priority
• Decide your maximum number of things / size of things you will work on at one time. Sometimes people finish this exercise and realise that they have 10 things running at the same time. Just visualising that can bring clarity. Better to finish fewer things faster, than have the progress of illusion where you are finishing 10 things much later

Block in times in your calendar where you need to work on stuff

This is one that comes from Neha Kirpalani via HBR:

What's the #1 Productivity Tool? For Me, It's Timeboxing.

Source

This gives you more structure. I use this to schedule in individual work e.g. 1 hour block for writing a first draft of a job description. 2 hours for updating career paths.

Also make sure you leave free slots for things like networking, reflection, and inspiration. If you don’t feel you can take time for this, this might be a reflection of your company culture and values. For reflection, 30 mins once a week is a good starting point. I mention this because:

• People who say yes to others a lot may deprioritise these things or sacrifice them if someone asks them to do something else. If you carve out the space and book it, you’re more likely to be conscious of that commitment and stick to it
• Reflection can help you see your own patterns, helps you see how you’re tracking towards goals, helps you celebrate everything you have achieved, and helps you get more learnings from experiences

Give yourself more liberty to say ‘no’ by communicating further than that

Depending on the context and audience, for some it might be liberating to do the following to say no. You can communicate::

• The ‘why’ — e.g. I am prioritising x work
• The alternative — e.g. I am prioritising x work, and here’s who can help instead / here’s what we’ve documented that might help to read
• When you can help if not now e.g. I am prioritising x work but if you want to check in with me again in 4 weeks, I can reassess then, or I can help from x date

If you’re working on multiple streams of work or with multiple teams, think about what you need and negotiate

Sometimes as a designer, I’ve worked on multiple product teams at the same time, and none of them had another designer.

This is not an ideal situation in a company that is further down its maturity: scale-up and beyond. I am not talking about startups where there might be one designer for the entire company. I believe the most impact comes from each product team having a dedicated designer. If not, designers can be stuck in hamster-wheel delivery mode. Not only is this bad for delivery and discovery, it usually harms a designer’s ability to do their own personal learning and networking, let alone contributing to team DesignOps and wider vision work. This is a whole other topic.

Perhaps you’re facing this situation temporarily until someone is hired. Perhaps you are even facing this situation within one product team.

Talk to your product managers and your manager about what you need to work successfully and to be healthy E.g. “I want to focus on one team at a time. I propose I work only on team x that has the higher priorities and we check in again in x weeks”. Or perhaps you need more support from the engineers — they need to deal with more ambiguity for a while and use the design system with your design QA so you have a bit more time to focus on other things that cannot be delegated.

I also would hope your team lead is having the more strategic conversation at the leadership level about the design of the team. However, it might be the company wants more designers but hasn’t been able to hire them yet due to the market, fast growth, etc.

Don’t assume something is due at a particular time, or that a reply is expected immediately. In general, over-communicate

Clarify when something is needed or how much effort to put into it

Lots of people will ask you for things. It’s good to clarify the urgency, sometimes they don’t need it. Sometimes they just ask because for them it’s for ‘free’! It’s no skin off their nose.

It’s also good to ask clarifying questions about priority or when something is needed by. You might assume it is higher priority, or needed sooner than it actually is. You can also clarify how high quality or detailed something needs to be by asking questions e.g. what’s the purpose, who is the audience? How you prepare for an internal knowledge share might be a different to something being shared at a board meeting. People won’t necessarily articulate this until you dig deeper.

In general, it’s better to be proactive and over communicate what you’re focussing on and what you’re not focussing on to whoever that matters to e.g. your product team. That gives room for early negotiation. Having agreement on that means you can also focus and re-negotiate if priorities change. By being transparent, this builds trust with others as well.

Don’t assume what someone’s intent is and set your boundaries

I had a conversation with my team about self-care during the first lockdown in Berlin. Some of the team were feeling pressure to respond to Slack messages late at night and wished that people would have enforced hours of communication to avoid this from happening.

While I see some companies are doing this in an effort to protect employees, I proposed a different perspective. With remote working, came a benefit of flexible working. The same day as this conversation, I had my German class which took up my lunch break + another hour of my time. I worked late that day to make up the time. But perhaps someone assumed I worked the whole way through the day.

When people write to us it is not a reflection of an expectation (necessarily). Perhaps the sender, like me, wanted to catch up on work at that time. Perhaps they focus better at night time. Perhaps they took advantage of our flexible core hours. My point is: you can communicate and set yourself up to not be pinged by this. Slack makes this really easy e.g. snoozing notifications. Of course this depends on your role e.g. an engineer on call will have a different mechanism and will actively be on the lookout for messages.

We have control over how we protect our own time and attention. This is what we can control, rather than trying to control others’ behaviours with blanket rules. With flexibility comes a bit more personal responsibility.

Plan your quarter in weeks

Here’s another approach I learned from Jason Taylor. Plan your entire quarter (or whatever time period fits you best), week-by-week. You can share this plan with others if that adds value. Just use estimates for different pieces of work e.g. discovery, etc. to see how the quarter looks. You’ll already get a feeling of where you need to negotiate and it helps you come from a stronger place when negotiating, because you have a clear plan you can point to.

Of course the plan will not stay the same for the whole quarter, but it’s a starting point.

Jason also suggested writing learnings as you go. As the plan changes, you can observe what’s going on and learn from it.

Be the change you seek. Make proposals to experiment with in your team

If something bigger is not working about how your team is working, propose something! If you don’t know what the solution is, that’s also ok — approach your trusted peers or your manager to brainstorm together.

Do you think your team could try a meeting-free day, or want to chunk up your meetings together, or think a meeting could be more efficient? Then raise it, suggest something, try it, and iterate.

Check in: are others also being accountable for their own responsibilities or are you taking too much responsibility?

Here are some common scenarios I’ve seen

People not delivering on their commitments or their responsibilities.

In this case, always start by over-communication, and be accountable yourself. Write summaries of expectations, use active listening, check in with people early. If this is a repeated pattern, start taking notes of what’s going on and what solutions or actions you took. You can raise that feedback with the person. If that doesn’t have a good outcome, bring that evidence to your manager for support

Sometimes people just outright ask you to do things that are really their own responsibility.

I’ve been asked many times to write to someone or setup a meeting with someone when I am not the one wanting something from the person or from that meeting. You need to be aware of what’s your responsibility or not. Every time you take responsibility for someone else’s stuff, you’re actually creating more risk for yourself.

Even recently outside of work, someone asked me to contact someone for an issue that was their own, and nothing to do with me. I was only aware of the situation. I immediately said ‘no’ and said they needed to raise that directly with the person. The funniest part of that? I asked them a few weeks later what the outcome was of their interaction, and they never raised their issue with the person. This person wasn’t willing to put their own skin in the game to solve their own problem, so why should I?

This kind of thing happens all the time in the workplace too. If you’re conscientious, wanting to help, wanting to be proactive, sometimes you can take this up. Don’t get wrapped up in the middle of things, people need to take responsibility for their stuff.

Does it need to be perfect?

If you feel you have perfectionist tendencies, you might benefit from support from your manager, mentor, career coach, etc. to help look at how to tackle the underlying feeling. 80% of the way might be enough.

“Don’t make perfect the enemy of good”

Don't Let "Perfect" Be the Enemy of "Good"

Accept meetings only when you’re clear it is valuable to join them

There are so many articles on this one, and your organisation might also have its own principles and culture around it. So briefly, scrutinise meetings and agendas. If there’s no agenda included in the invite, ask the organiser. I’m more of a fan of being a team player and asking, rather than immediately declining. Because I hope this way, the person has a chance to update the invite and learn from it.

But if you understand the agenda and you cannot contribute / get value, or you can do that another way that is better, then communicate and decline.

If you don’t have enough support, consider your options

As I said at the beginning of the article, this has been more about practical tips for individuals who tend to say ‘yes’ a lot.

When you have done everything you can to take personal action and to raise issues, and you are left feeling under-supported or still overwhelmed, it’s a good time for reflection. If you feel confident you’ve done everything you can, the root cause might be at the organisational / cultural level regarding healthy boundaries, accountability, taking responsibility etc. The environment might not be the best fit.

What’s your feedback?

I would be interested to hear what has worked and not worked for people in the past, and what’s missing. These are just some ideas. I’d even be happy if they provoke some new reflections for people that help them try different things.