Why Bother with Workload Planning?
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A good plan today is better than a perfect plan tomorrow. – General George S. Patton
If you don't know where you are going, you'll end up someplace else. – Yogi Berra
Taking time to plan out and analyze your workload can feel like a big investment—why spend time developing and maintaining an individual workload plan when there is so much to do? However, research shows that leaders at all levels can benefit from workload planning—even if you take a minimalist approach.
Why Bother?
Workload planning allows you to lay out project-based work and operational/ongoing work across a timeline. You can estimate when you’ll be busy, when you have lighter periods, and—most importantly—when you might need to adjust timelines, adjust scope, or bring in more resources to do what needs to be done.
You can intentionally plan important activities that sometimes get moved down the to-do list such as professional development, process improvement ideas, and leave time.
Workload plans allow for more direct conversations among supervisors and direct reports. Having a workload plan can serve as your regular agenda for check-ins with your supervisor, helping you update them on important issues within the context of your overall portfolio and ask for advice or additional assistance. Similarly, if your direct reports maintain workload plans, you can talk through those at your check-ins, offering support or advice as needed. In both situations, the workload plan allows you to create a shared focus which supports problem-solving (and helps de-escalate any conflict that might be brewing).
Even a basic workload plan can be helpful. Being able to estimate the number of hours you’ll need to complete an activity or project is ideal, but having a general or qualitative idea of how much time something takes works fine too. You can think of this as a continuum:
- from the most basic workload plan you maintain on a whiteboard or notepad,
- to a workload tracker you build with Excel and basic formulas,
- all the way to a complex project management or workflow system where a whole team’s portfolio rolls out to individual work plans.
Like any kind of plan, workload planning requires some up front and ongoing time for development and maintenance, but being intentional about how we spend our weeks and months at work can help us feel (and be!) more in control and effective.
Getting Started with Work Planning
Here’s a quick way to get started with workload planning, regardless of what kind of tool you use.
- Start with a table or matrix—this can be a table you draw, a table in Word or Excel, or in a project planning or workflow application. Tip: Excel allows you to easily add formulas and conditional formatting that can make analysis easier. The screenshot below shows an example of this kind of table in Excel and another version that uses markers on a white board.
- List all of your projects or categories of work as rows in a table. Keep the categories broad, at least on your first pass—this isn’t a task list or a project plan, and granular detail in a workplan can be hard to maintain.
- Consider other categories that you should include in the list such as professional development, process improvement ideas, and leave time.
- Across the top of the table, add uniform measures of time – such a week, two weeks, or a month. While longer time increments work well for long-term or high-level planning, two-week periods seem to work well to start developing a workload plan. You should adjust the time periods to fit your teams and project schedules.
- If you are able to estimate time for different activities, try these steps:
- For the last row of the table, add a line that shows the total number of work hours available for the time period you selected (for example, 40 hours for a week). This will serve as your reality check when you compare your projected workload to time available.
- For each project, and for each segment of time, insert your estimate of how many hours you will need to spend on the project or activity. If you don’t have an overall project plan to draw from, you can estimate based on the number of hours in a day or a week that you’d likely need for a specific time period. For example, if you produce a quarterly report that takes about a day to complete, and if you need to complete it as close as possible to the end of the quarter, you’d put “8” hours in the cell for the last time period in the quarter.
- After you’ve populated each row with your time estimates, take a look at the total number of hours you have allocated for each period of time. (This is where using a spreadsheet is helpful!)
- If you aren’t able to estimate the amount of time for projects or activities, you can still do workload planning using general proportions as shown in the white board example using these instructions:
- Use blocks and lines to show proportionality and time across your projects and ongoing work.
- After you’ve completed all rows, step back and look at the overall view, and assess where you’re more or less booked with work.
- If you find yourself overloaded with projected work in a certain period, start asking yourself these questions:
- Have I projected accurately? (One gut check: look at the total number of hours for the project or activity over the time period you’re analyzing—does that seem reasonable?)
- If the crunch period is in one time segment: Is there a way to shift work over a longer time horizon so I’m not overloaded? (For example, can you start something a little earlier?)
- Are there ways I can rescope the work to match my availability?
- Is there someone else who can help with a specific project or activity during a crunch period?
- Finally make adjustments to your workload tracker as needed. Revisiting your workload every week or two is usually enough. Trying to keep it up-to-the minute may require more administrative time than is useful.
Examples
Example 1: Excel Version of a Workplan
Basic formulas summarize total project and other work, and allow the employee and manager to see peaks and valleys in availability. In the example, there may be an opportunity to shift some of the work from the end of November to the beginning of December to avoid the overload in November. Based on this tracker, the person will have room to take on more projects/activities in January.
Example 2: Whiteboard or Paper Version of a Workplan
Project B is a large project, with the bulk of the work happening in May and June. This may mean that some of the work called Ongoing A could be shifted to allow more time to focus. It also looks like this person may have capacity to take on other work in early April and late July.