Shorten the task (reduce the scope of the task). Sometimes you can find ways to make a task take less time. For example, when installing Bob's PC, you might realize that Bob is a chatty person and the task will take half as long if you do the installation without him standing there. Alternatively, maybe you were going to put a number of extra software packages on his machine. However, Bob is fairly technical and you know that if you don't install some of the extras, he is capable of installing them himself. In fact, maybe he'll appreciate being allowed to do things his way. If he needs the additional packages, he will ask for them, or you can tell him what you didn't install and offer to come back later to install them. Now Bob gets the instant gratification of using his PC, and you can move on to other tasks. Of course, you'll write "Finish installing Bob's software" on your to do list for tomorrow so you don't forget.
Change the time estimate. You should always overestimate how long something will take. It's just safer that way. However, sometimes you may go too far, and you will find you can reduce your time estimate to make things fit while still being realistic about the time commitment.
Delegate. Sometimes you can find someone else to take on a task. Junior SAs look forward to being given more challenging assignments that let them learn new skills. Of course, you don't always have the authority to delegate, which brings us to the next suggestion.
Ask your boss for help prioritizing. When you have a full to do list, prioritized and annotated with realistic time estimates, you can really wow your boss by showing the list to her and asking for help setting priorities. If you've never done this, it might sound like I'm describing some kind of fantasy land, but the truth is that managers often feel like they have very little power over what their staff does, and it is quite a breath of fresh air to be asked, "Am I prioritizing these correctly?" (Of course, if you do this every day you'll get dinged on the "works independently" question on your yearly evaluation.) Once when I did this, my boss was able to clarify the priorities he wanted me to work on, which helped me in general. Another time, my boss saw a few to do items that he hadn't realized the team was involved with and eliminated them (his words were, "Joe Schmoe needs to learn to do that himself. I'm going to have a talk with his manager"). Sometimes I've had entire categories of tasks removed ("Tell Joe we no longer support that, and if he has a problem he should talk with me"), and occasionally my boss has delegated tasks to other coworkers. I find most SAs don't know that this option exists and yet, used judiciously, it can be the most powerful time management tool around.
Delay a meeting or appointment. Delaying a meeting can be really bad. Rescheduling can be a nightmare, or annoy many people, or possibly delay a project. However, you can voluntarily miss a meeting or send a delegate. If you are supposed to attend a two-hour meeting—just to make sure that when the new server is discussed you can point out that it only comes in blue, not red—send a delegate to do that. (And if it starts a major discussion, the delegate can call you into the meeting.) Postponing an appointment is better than missing an appointment. I've found that when I postpone an appointment in person or via phone (i.e., not via email, which is not very interactive) often the person is able to shorten the appointment (cut to the chase). Oh, all he really wanted was to know whether the server was going to be red or blue? Well, it's going to be blue.
Work late. I'm listing this option purely for completeness. This has got to be the worst option. Most people have four to five productive hours in them each day. Anything more is spinning your wheels. That's why books like Extreme Programming (O'Reilly) and PeopleWare (Dorset House) recommend eliminating overtime. However, it's also part of the SA's job to work late sometimes. As we discussed in the section "Delegate, Record, or Do" in Chapter 2, when there is an emergency, customers expect all hands to be working on the issue until it is resolved.
Back to our example to do list:
Let's move low-priority tasks to the next day. You have one C priority called "Investigate mon s'ware." Let's move this to the next day.
If you are using a PDA, you bump the entry to the next day's list. If you are using a PAA, mark the entry with a hyphen to indicate that it was moved, and hand copy the entry to the next day's to do list.
You've reduced today's workload by one hour. You still need to eliminate two more hours.
Luckily, you also have a B priority (GCC upgrade) that can be moved to the next day. You move it the same way as you did the C priorities (PDA: bump it; PAA: mark it with a hyphen in today's list and handwrite it into tomorrow's list). Now your list looks like Figure 5-6 and matches your number of available hours.
Figure 5-6. A fully loaded Monday with overflow priorities moved to Tuesday
Dealing with Long-Term Projects
How do you deal with a long term-project? When a to do item is going to take six months, how do you work that into the time estimates for today?
It is important to break big projects into smaller steps or milestones. Very big projects often have project managers who do that for you. For your own projects, you need to do this for yourself. Take a moment to break the project into parts and estimate how long each will take. Write each milestone on the to do list of the day you are supposed to start working on it, or mark it on your calendar if it is far enough out. It's this kind of planning that really impresses managers.
On my daily to do list, I write the name of the project and the current milestone. That way I'm reminded of the larger goal as I work on each daily task. For example, I might write "Network Reorg—map current network."