Scott Triglia - Surviving (and thriving!) when you are overloaded

Surviving (and thriving!) when you are overloaded @scott_triglia I want
to start by describing a only-slightly-hypothetical story. See if it sounds familiar to you

@scott_triglia A good day at work for me looks approximately
like this. I like to lounge on the floor of my office, which is naturally all beige like i’m in a photo studio. I rock an old school laptop and make sure to keep my sleeves rolled up just a touch for the right blend of casual and business. https://pxhere.com/en/photo/1331245

@scott_triglia But all is not perfect. I realize one day
I’m starting to fall behind at work My to-do backlog is stacking up, and I’m actively losing ground against it. My comfortable lounging on the floor has become stress-induced hunching in a corner booth I’m starting to realize this isn’t going well…no longer just feeling behind but getting outright nervous about deadlines.

@scott_triglia I’m spending even more time every week working, yet
falling further behind. I can’t even look my novelty 1960s style terminal in the eye anymore. Things I care about outside work suffer start to suffer. Stress bleeds into time with my wife, my exercise regimen goes from “not great” to “nonexistent”, even my sleep goes downhill.

@scott_triglia So my question to us is how do I
reverse this trend? Burnout is at the end of this path. And not a pretty, artsy kind of burnout. More of a “Scott’s life is in shambles” kind of burnout. And joking aside, I’ve experienced this path before. It’s terrifyingly easy to accidentally slip into a work life where you have way too much to do, and have that degrade into something far worse before you realize what’s happening.

@scott_triglia 4 mins in And that’s why we’re here today!
Learn from my painful lessons so you avoid them :) I’ve found approaches that have made a big difference in how I handle being overloaded, and want to share them with you today. Sadly there are far too few adorable kittens, but I hope you find it useful nonetheless.

@scott_triglia what are we doing today

@scott_triglia noticing overload identifying priorities offloading work So let’s get
down to the details! I’m going to talk about three topics today that roughly map out how I approach this problem.

@scott_triglia One huge assist: a supportive environment And I want
to make one huge, and very crucial, caveat before we dive in. I’m assuming you’re working in a supportive environment, where this process of identifying overload, picking priorities, and safely handing off the rest of your work is realistic. This is not everywhere! I’ve been very very fortunate to work in an incredibly supportive environment at Yelp and I also play life on a particularly easy difficulty setting when interacting with considering nearly any systemic oppression.     If your workplace does not have your back, or you are fighting systemic bias when dealing with overload,

@scott_triglia Noticing Overload

@scott_triglia Why am I making such a big deal out
of “noticing”? Well it’s because not noticing is a real danger! I bring this up because for me, within my own experience, I’ve misdiagnosed the cause of falling behind many many times! Correctly diagnosing the reason I’ve fallen behind is a crucial first step to improving things. In fact there are several pitfalls we have to avoid at this stage

@scott_triglia Easy for impostor syndrome to blame your own skill
I find “work harder” to very very rarely be the correct response. If you truly are in over your head — congrats, you’re overloaded!

@scott_triglia Think blameless postmortems: Overload -> fix the system Think
of it like blameless postmortems: we shouldn’t see overload and say “Scott is at fault for not being good at his job”, we should see overload and identify a systemic cause “Scott’s workload isn’t realistic” and reduce that workload.

@scott_triglia time Overload If we think about overload as something
that compounds over time, it becomes obvious that noticing early is vital. Particularly because the amount of new work we accumulate per day probably increases once we exceed our own threshold for keeping up.

@scott_triglia so how do I notice overload? identify symptoms

@scott_triglia the same important hard thing on my todo list
for a week

@scott_triglia noticing myself doing things i’m comfortable with, not the
most important stuff job focused on tech leadership, year long roadmaps

@scott_triglia working later, working weekends, thinking of work at night

@scott_triglia Build a regular routine of evaluating your criteria Great!
We know what we want to track, all that’s left is to effectively track it over time. I like to keep this dead simple — set a calendar reminder for yourself at a regular frequency like one week, and measure each of your criteria to see how you’re doing. Now you might be concerned about how to accurately measure squishy concepts like “am I

@scott_triglia anything you need to quantify can be measured in
some way that is superior to not measuring it all. - Tom Gilb (Gilb’s Law)

@scott_triglia I referenced continuous integration as a practice earlier, but
that’s actually literally what we’re going to do. Come up with a plan, try it out and see how well it works, iterate as needed. I like making a running document of your historical success/failure. Start very simple: once/week run through your list and double check how you’re doing!

@scott_triglia Ask team-mates or colleagues you trust to help keep
an eye out for you Again in that supporting environment, hopefully you have a boss who would love to work with you to keep an eye out for the danger signs, or you focusing on the wrong kind of work, and they can flag things you might miss entirely. *** fix wording ***

@scott_triglia So we’ve built a way for us to detect
when there is a problem. Great! Now what do we do about having too much work?

@scott_triglia Identifying priorities

@scott_triglia It’s time to spend serious time considering what we
should be focused on Once you work somewhere for any serious amount of time the whole world is going to start producing work for you

@scott_triglia https://www.manager-tools.com/ 2007/01/the-juggling-koan https://www.manager-tools.com/2007/01/the-juggling-koan

@scott_triglia The metaphor starts with an empty box. This represents
how much our fixed time we can allocate to our work (let’s say every week, for the sake of argument)

@scott_triglia You and your boss have probably agreed on a
bunch of tasks you work on! We represent these with circles and we note that they aren’t all equally easy. There are a few large priorities (four here) and many more smaller priorities. Collectively they fill up our time and make sure we aren’t sitting around without work to do.

@scott_triglia Now the trick comes when our boss, or coworkers,
or our own brain decide that we have even more work to do! All of a sudden we have a choice to make about what we’re going to do with our limited time.

@scott_triglia Now the trick comes when our boss, or coworkers,
or our own brain decide that we have even more work to do! All of a sudden we have a choice to make about what we’re going to do with our limited time.     We can pile on all the work directly on top and hope we can balance it! This isn’t recommended, but we can fake it for a bit this way. We can take some balls out of our box and replace them with this new work. Maybe the new things are more important? I really like this metaphor because it forces me to admit a few things

@scott_triglia My ability and time are finite

@scott_triglia If I’m fully loaded, adding new tasks better remove
others

@scott_triglia Not all tasks are equally hard or equally important
But what this metaphor doesn’t tell us is how we figure out what exactly we are juggling?

@scott_triglia or If you’re so inclined, you can use apps
like RescueTime to tell you what you spend your time doing. They require fairly invasive permissions, but they’re completely automated! My preference is a little more basic, but can be done historically and without extra software. I just take an inventory of the major ways I spend my time…things like ticket trackers, appointments in my calendar, and time spent pushing code.

@scott_triglia The things you’re doing may well be important, but
not everything can or should be done by you!

@scott_triglia https://jamesclear.com/eisenhower-box Which leads us to ask what we actually
should be juggling Eisenhower Matrix “is what I’m working on urgent? is it important?” We’re very interested in the top row here. These are probably our main goals for our role. Try to group these into our main challenges.

@scott_triglia https://jamesclear.com/eisenhower-box Note the top left area — this is
probably stuff you’re doing now. It’s pretty rare for you to have important and urgent work you’re not doing, and you’ll probably get some feedback about it if you do!

@scott_triglia https://jamesclear.com/eisenhower-box Note the top right area — this is
dangerous! These are the things we might just accidentally never do!

@scott_triglia https://jamesclear.com/eisenhower-box We want coverage of the whole top row
here. These are probably our main goals for our role, and we should feel comfortable with our game plan for tackling them!

@scott_triglia * write down your role’s top high- level challenges
* pick top N (3 or 4 works well) * find tasks that further those An old boss of mine, Alex Levy, introduced me to this approach to identify which of your tasks are important to your current role. This picks out those important tasks from all the ones you’re currently working on. In my case at least, it also exposes some interesting things that aren’t important to my current role.

@scott_triglia https://jamesclear.com/eisenhower-box An example of some things for me that
fell into this bottom row: * tasks only I knew how to do (bus factor of 1) * key tasks from an old role I never handed off * relatively unimportant things I just enjoyed doing Now clearly we don’t want to handle all those examples the same way. Some are safe to just stop doing, but others are critical and I need to work to share them with other colleagues.

@scott_triglia Offloading Work …and that brings us to our final
section

@scott_triglia Levels of involvement And as we’re handing work off,
it’s important to recognize we can still remain partially involved, we simply need to be intentional about what kind of involvement.

@scott_triglia RACI model: * Responsible (does work) * Accountable (sign
off) * Consulted (expert witness) * Informed (just FYI) The RACI model does a great job differentiating the types of involvement you might have.

@scott_triglia Old role: responsible/accountable for service testing New role: only
consulted/informed If in my case I just changed up from working on a team to working across a few teams, I probably can’t be as tightly involved as I used to be. No matter how much I cared about one of my personal projects, I need to go from being solely responsible/blocking, to just being informed. I have to hand off that ownership to someone new (and support them!) and keep myself at a lower involvement level that matches my current role’s goals.

@scott_triglia Be careful of accidentally slipping into old roles! It
can be hard to break the cycles you’re used to; easy to slip back into working on things you meant to offload! Find ways of intentionally interrupting this accidental slide back into doing work you intended to offload. You might find yourself habitually acting like your old “accountable” role when you meant to be just “informed”. Be strict with yourself!

@scott_triglia (I like the “pomodoro” system) Everyone will have their
own approach that works, but I appreciate the regular check-ins provided by the Pomodoro system. It chunks my work into small intervals, and regularly forces me to ask myself 1) if I’m working on the most important tasks and 2) if I’m making regular progress. Perfect for ensuring I’m working on what I intend to, not what my lizard brain decides is shiniest.

@scott_triglia Opportunity to grow others — tasks that you’ve gotten
good at are learning opportunities for others! If I’ve been in the most senior test engineer for my team for the last three years, I’m probably pretty good at it. But handing that mantle off to someone else might be a huge step up for them and really valuable! Look for things that are valuable to others and either hand off the task entirely or, if it’s too heavy for them initially, help mentor them until they’re able to fully take it.

@scott_triglia @juliepagano A couple years ago, Julie Pagano gave a
Pycon about the invisible things that make working in tech hard. She makes this phenomenal point: that we shouldn’t revere others as having magic heroic powers. They are humans just like us! Managing the amount of work you have is not reserved for masters of productivity — it is a 100% learnable skill. You have the power to both learn how to manage your own overload, and explicitly teach that to others!

@scott_triglia Lessons Learned

@scott_triglia The core thesis of this talk is that being
overloaded is bad for everyone — you, your colleagues, whatever business or project you work on. Finding the space and effective strategies to address overload is an extremely high value way to spend your time, and you’ll physically feel better as a bonus!

@scott_triglia My core argument today is that the most valuable
thing you can do for your own sanity and efficiency at work is probably to simply do less. If you’re inclined toward a management-style book, “essentialism” covers a lot of ground for arguing in favor of a slimmed down approach to picking a few things to focus on.

@scott_triglia Make sure you are doing the right work Help
others learn to do the same Let’s teach ourselves to get a handle on our own workload, then loudly repeat to anyone who will listen that they can do the same. This is a skill like any other, not some mythical productivity secret you’ll unlock if you just read the right Lifehacker article.

@scott_triglia Step 1: learn to catch overload early so you
can react

@scott_triglia Step 2: brainstorm top priorities audit tasks for importance

@scott_triglia Step 3: safely and wisely offload non-priority work Use
as an excuse to grow colleagues!

@scott_triglia Heroes are for comics and movies, not the workplace
Humility is key. Don’t be a hero. Honest about limits, willing to ask for help and share glory. Being honest about work you can’t do doesn’t mean you get to act like it is unimportant. And if you’re asking another person to accept a task, make sure you’re helping them achieve it!

@scott_triglia Take 10% of the time spent tweaking your IDE
and use it to prioritize the right work and if you only take one thing away from this talk — I hope it’s that a small amount of work can have huge benefits when it comes to properly prioritizing how you spend your time. Overload and burnout don’t have to be the default state, and you can actively learn to control them better. I hope you all take just a little time, maybe 10% of what you spent configuring vim last year, and devote it to prioritizing the right work and making your life much better in the process.

@YelpEngineering fb.com/YelpEngineers engineeringblog.yelp.com github.com/yelp @scott_triglia Once again, I’m Scott Triglia.
If you’d like to talk to me about this topic or anything else, I’ll be at the Yelp booth in the expo fair today and tomorrow. Thanks for coming out!

Scott Triglia - Surviving (and thriving!) when ...

Scott Triglia - Surviving (and thriving!) when you are overloaded

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