Doing all your work is rookie bullshit and a Pro who wants to keep their sanity doesn’t even try.
But before we dive into that, you know what else is bullshit? Multi-tasking.
Multi-tasking doesn’t exist. It’s a lie. So while you think you are always doing three things at once at your desk and being oh-so-productive and efficient, you aren’t. Sadly, the brain can only do two things at once if one of those things is dead fucking simple and can be achieved with minimal cognitive load. So an experienced driver can operate a car and have a conversation because the driving is semi-automatic for them. A beginner driver should shut up and focus on the road.
Working on two things at once and dividing your focus just makes you worse. You can’t write a Professional email and engage in a Professional conversation at the same time. You certainly can’t author a presentation on current market penetration while updating management on a server outage.
When you find yourself doing multiple things, you aren’t multi-tasking. You are “Context/Task Switching”. You do one thing a little -> then you stop -> then do the other thing a little -> then go back to the first thing. The switching may be quick for you, but context switching produces shoddy work that takes longer than doing the tasks serially, because you pay a penalty every time you switch focus. It’s true, I swear.
And here is the worst part – the more complicated the tasks, the longer the penalty.
So back to not doing all of your work… If you are anything like me, you have a long “to do” list. You may have even read about better ways to manage your lists, tried different technologies, bought a pad with checkboxes on it… Whatever. Everyone you meet will tell you their system. I could too but I won’t.
The sad fact is that even if you did everything on your “to do” list, they will just give you more work. Most of the time they will not only give you more work, but if you are good at what you’ve done, they will make that work more challenging.
The situation becomes rapidly untenable, as the better you do, the more they give you. Eventually you will not only fail, but the quality of your work will also suffer. Work you were great at a few months back gets worse and takes longer as new responsibilities ramp up.
There is only one way out: Don’t complete all of your work.
Start treating your “To Do” list also as a “To Don’t” list. Your boss is never going to tell you not to do your work, but they should be able to help you prioritize which of it to do first. As long as you do those things, and do them well – just punt everything else. You’ll be amazed at the results.
Let’s say you have 6 work deliverables – items A,B,C and X, Y, Z. Eventually your manager will ask about them. Simply say, “Last time we spoke, you told me to focus on A, B, and C. When I finish those, I was going to start on X, Y and Z. Would you like me to do X, Y and Z first?”
They’ll say no, and voila! Half the work. And all your time can be spent killing the important stuff.
By the time your boss talks to you again, you’ll have accumulated a pile of new things to do. So that conversation is incredibly similar… When they say “What’s the status of X,Y,Z?” you can reply, “They’re on my list, but I’m working on D,E,F instead. Is that a good plan?”
You just punted them again!
You’ll be able to punt some things for months. Other things forever! You’ll be amazed how many things you never have to do. Since you don’t do these things and still have them on your list, management will also always think you have too much work. So if they ever really want X, Y and Z done, they may even stop adding more crap to your pile.