What is your strategy for handling requests?
Most people like helping others. If somebody makes a reasonable request of us that we can do, it’s hard to say no.
But what do you do when the number of requests exceeds what you can actually do?
This is actually not a hard question. Most of us have experience with strategic planning, a process to allocate scarce resources (e.g. budget, headcount, engineering time) among various priorities. You look at your list of priorities, you decide what’s most important, and you accept that you can’t get to everything.
You can apply the same concepts to planning your own time. If you can’t get to all the tasks being requested of you, don’t try to do them all – you will burn yourself out. Consider which requests are the most important, perhaps by prioritizing your key stakeholders. and accept that some people will be disappointed.
When I was Chief of Staff, my version of this was that I rarely answered email requests from people I didn’t know. I would look them up in Google’s directory, and unless they were a VP or maybe a director, I wouldn’t respond until the third time they contacted me. Most of the time, they figured out another way to get what they needed without me doing anything, which was my desired outcome.
You may be thinking it’s a jerk move to ignore people like that, to treat my time as more valuable than theirs. But the alternative was worse. My first year as Chief of Staff, I was so eager to help people that I jumped on every request; after all, my responsibility was the whole business, so I should respond to every request. That approach led to me being ineffective and exhausted because I was teaching people that if they didn’t want to do some low-value task, they could get me to do it. Only by prioritizing and planning my time and attention was I able to be more effective. Again, the irony was that I literally led the strategic planning process each year to decide how to deploy our limited resources, and yet it took me a couple years to treat my own time and attention as limited and apply those same skills.
What’s your strategic plan for your time and attention?
How do you prioritize what’s most important?
How do you handle the less important requests, especially if they’re “urgent”?