Handling an overwhelming #of tasks at work; both small big ones
August 3, 2015 7:23 AM   Subscribe

I have a problem with balance between numerous low importance tasks and the ones that really drive business. I find that sometimes I am too focused on the little things to keep from being buried. Everything seems urgent. How do I deal?

I work as a manufacturer’s representative and represent a company that is VERY customer service oriented and requires us to take care of all retail customers whether large and small.

I have about 100 purchasing customers. Some are big and place orders in the hundreds of thousands of dollars and there are some that only place small orders for parts; literally as small as $5.00 at times. Additionally, I am responsible for taking care of about 100 big box chain stores. They don’t order product though me but I am responsible for service and again, ordering parts and handling defective goods. I can be interrupted 10 or 15 times a day by calls every day and I can only prioritize so much. If I only focus on my larger customers and most important tasks over the less important smaller ones I fall behind and drown. Falling behind on the smaller tasks means I end up with numerous upset customers and even more time consuming work trying to catch up for them.

I’ve done Getting Things Done and read about other systems of organization. I could prioritize much better in the past when my customer base was around 15-20 and less detail intensive.

Does anybody have any suggestion in how to manage things when everything large and small are basically all priorities?
posted by Che boludo! to Work & Money (5 answers total) 10 users marked this as a favorite
 
I could prioritize much better in the past when my customer base was around 15-20 and less detail intensive.

So now you have five times the customers and more than five times the work because each requires greater attention to detail?

You may be trying to do too much alone. No matter how well you prioritize you can get overwhelmed by too much action and that doesn't require better prioritization, it requires more horsepower.
posted by jet_silver at 7:54 AM on August 3, 2015 [3 favorites]


Once you hit a certain quantity of tasks, spending time on prioritizing becomes a waste. As long as you have a system for capturing to-do's you just need to power through them and not stress about it. Go in order of when requests were received so that small stuff doesn't get missed. It's important to not let yourself be stressed because that's a waste of time too. Then, once you have a sense of how many to-do's you can process in a day, and how long things are waiting in the queue, you can make a case that what they're asking you to do is not humanly possible.
posted by bleep at 9:05 AM on August 3, 2015


I concur with jet_silver. Task saturation is a kind of helmet fire.

Assuming you can't get help, can you ask people to send emails rather than calling?
posted by MonkeyToes at 9:12 AM on August 3, 2015 [1 favorite]


Agree with above. Unless you're wasting a lot of time at work it sounds like you just work at an understaffed and/or poorly-managed organization.
posted by Asparagus at 3:01 PM on August 5, 2015


Do you have any latitude when it comes to setting times when you can be reached by phone?
posted by MonkeyToes at 6:28 PM on August 5, 2015


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