Three Methods of Workplace Triage
We’ve all been there. The workday has only just begun, and you don’t know where to start! When work piles up, how do you tackle an endless barrage of people and things that need your attention? The answer is triage. Much like a doctor has to categorize patients in order of medical urgency, finding a triage method that works for you can help you tackle your workday. Here are three different ways to approach it:
1. Eat the Frog
If you have to eat a frog, you might as well do it first. Begin with identifying the one thing you don’t want to do and why. Is it a small task but uncomfortable to follow through with, like giving someone bad news? Eat it. Is it a daunting task you’ve been putting off because you’re worried about how the result will look? Eat it. Get that one thing you’re dreading out of the way, and you’ll start to feel a lot better about all the other things you have to do. Hey, if you can eat a frog, you can eat anything!
2. The 5-Minute Rule
List everything you’ve got for the day and separate what will take five minutes or less to do. These could be tasks like responding to an email, making a follow-up call, or getting something important into the mail. Knocking out six tasks in 30 minutes does more than just make you FEEL productive. It also allows you to focus on the more involved work without a gigantic list of unfinished things staring you in the face. If you start with a bigger task and overestimate how much time it involves, you risk letting all those little things go undone and stressing you out. What’s worse is at the end of the day when all you’ve crossed off is one thing.
3 Hazardous and Imminent
Draw an XY graph with the two variables being hazardous (how much damage a task will do if it doesn’t get done) and imminent (how soon the damage is likely to occur). From there, categorize all of your tasks based on these two qualities. Your top priorities will be in the upper-right quadrant of the graph—the things that will cause a lot of damage sooner rather than later. This method can put your work into perspective. Say you’ve got a task that, if neglected, will do a lot of damage, but you’ve got six months to do it. Maybe it would be smarter to handle a task that does less damage, but you’ll feel the ramifications tomorrow.
In reality, you’ll find a way to workplace triage that combines different methods. When overwhelmed, I start my day with the 5-minute rule and then do a second round of triage with the hazardous and imminent. Once in a while, when that uneasy feeling in the pit of my stomach grows over a weekend, I know on Monday morning I may have to show up and eat a frog.