Don't Automatically Accept Others' Timelines

As project managers, requests tend to fly at us all day. From project changes and status requests to process improvements and new projects to begin, tasks big and small come at us from all directions, and we must collect, organize, and work through them at a pace our companies find acceptable.

The work of organizing my own work is a non-trivial part of where my real workday as a project manager is lived. There are many tactical and philosophical ways I try to make this process more effective and less stressful for myself. Today I’d like to share another new strategy I’ve been using lately that is helping keep my workload manageable—and thus, my stress level down.

It starts with this question: how do you decide when you’ll try to complete each of the work requests made of you?

Some of them come with explicit deadlines or completion date requests. Some of them don’t—but do you ever notice yourself picking up on an implied level of urgency by the way the request is phrased…and internalizing that expectation, whether you ever identify and write down a due date or not?

I’ve realized I’d been automatically internalizing both stated and implied timelines for every request, making them my own in the way I dated them on my to-do lists, and—here’s the kicker—operating at a constant level of high stress to try to achieve them all, and feeling both physically exhausted and emotionally crushed at the end of most workdays when I didn’t finish everything I’d hoped to.

Here's the trouble: coworkers and clients who make requests of us have no real sense of our capacity or what competing priorities might be on our plates. In their book How Big Things Get Done, Flyvbjerg and Gardner discuss research that indicates people routinely underestimate how long things will take. Whether it’s their own tasks or larger projects that involve many people, time estimates are biased toward the most optimistic conditions of how things might play out.

I believe people have the same bias when they imagine how quickly we “surely” could fit in their request between whatever else they imagine we have to do. Combine that optimism with their desire to have their own request completed as soon as possible, and it’s a recipe for us as project managers to be routinely asked to do more, faster, than we realistically can. At least if we’re going to work at a sustainable pace for a reasonable number of hours each week.

If you’re a nice and caring person, it’s totally understandable that you would want to deliver things to others on the timeline they ask for, or according to the level of urgency they express. But if you do this automatically, without thinking, always, it’s a recipe for overwhelm and burnout.

So what other option do you have? Don’t automatically accept the stated or implied timeline you’re given. Instead, stop, think, and choose your own target completion date that’s compatible with:

1. A natural pace of work for you
2. A sustainable number of work hours for you
3. The actual relative priority of the item, compared to your other items

The essential point for me in making this change has been to stop letting this be a passive process and start making it an active process. I’m not passively accepting others’ timelines. I’m actively deciding to operate on my own timeline for the task that works for me.

This may sound selfish or unrealistic at first blush, but in reality it is the best way to ensure you can do the most good work over many years—even, if you will, for your company to get the most good work out of you for many years. It is in your company’s interest as well as your own. Cal Newport has a lot of great things to say about why this approach is so important.

When you first transition to deciding your own turnaround time on tasks, you likely won’t understand how quickly you can achieve things at your new pace. So to start, avoid promising turnaround times whenever possible. If needed, kindly mention a few other high-priority items on your plate to temper the other party’s expectations. You will likely need to promise dates in a few cases, but the less you promise, the more you can practice pulling the next thing off your to do list, doing it, pulling the next thing, doing it (also known as “using a pull-based approach”—look it up!) and getting in touch with what your natural pace actually is.

How to actually prioritize your tasks well is a subject for another blog, but if this part is hard for you, my quick suggestion is to break down your task list into meaningful categories and then prioritize within those categories—while making sure each category has regular dedicated time for you to work on it.

As you look back, then, on how quickly you achieve things at a natural pace, you will start to get in touch with what turnaround times you can realistically promise people—though I’d still avoid promising hard dates when you can, to give yourself flexibility and breathing room.

What surprised me when I moved away from passively absorbing others’ timeline expectations and began to stop, think, and make my own choice about how quickly I’d try to get each item done, I was surprised that it felt like a lot of WORK. I joked initially that it felt like another full-time job, because I am in fact spending more energy and brainpower managing my own work than I was before. But it has gotten easier with practice, and the investment is small compared to what I get back: less anxiety about disappointing others (because I haven’t made their timeline my goal), more focus to do good work, and an easier time choosing to work on what’s most important rather than what’s most urgent.

And best of all, I get lower stress and I actually get to enjoy this job I find so meaningful. As a project manager, I have the tools to usher big, important results and changes into the world. I also ought to be able to protect my own capacity to do that well, and to enjoy the journey.