Too Many Projects: Move Past Overwhelm and Make Meaningful Progress

This blog was inspired by this post on Reddit, and is an expansion on the comment I wrote in response.

What’s a “normal” number of projects for one project manager to lead or support at a time?

Usually I don’t find the word “normal” very helpful, but it’s a natural question to ask if the number of projects you’re supporting right now feels like too many.

According to Indeed, a project manager “should” manage between 3 and 20 projects, depending on a number of factors. Based on my anecdotal experience reading and talking to project professionals over my years in the field, between 3 and 20 projects is also a common range. If you asked me to estimate how many project managers we’d find out in the world supporting what project loads, I’d draw you something like this:

Even though less than 20 projects is a common load, people in the long tail—on the right side of the graph—we’re out there. We’re not an insignificant number. There’s a reason one of the major emphases of Elizabeth Harrin’s resources at Rebel’s Guide to Project Management is to help you thrive while managing multiple projects at a time. I attended a live Q&A hosted by Cornelius Fichtner once about managing multiple projects, and I connected with a few fellow attendees in the comments about our experience supporting more than 50 projects at a time—past the right end of my graph.

My Experience with a High Project Load

And yet, I still have the highest project load of any project manager I’ve met or heard about so far. I currently support about 100 active projects. A few of them are large. Many are small. But they all require cross-functional teams and need to be tracked, so they all count as projects, and they all need a project manager to run smoothly.

I love most things about my job. If I could, my project load is one of the few things I’d change. I would love to pour more of my focus into fewer projects, giving more robust support to each one. That being said, I’ve learned and grown a ton from managing this many projects over the years. I’ve experimented with many approaches to thriving with a high project load, and this is what I’ve concluded: There isn't a magic-bullet solution, but many different techniques have each helped a little, and putting a lot of those techniques together has made a meaningful difference in my ability to do my job well without being overwhelmed.

I’ll spend the rest of this post telling you about the techniques that have made the biggest difference for me, so you can try them and adapt them for yourself and your own situation.

One note before we dive in: I don’t want to downplay your experience if you’re on the left side of my graph above, but still feel overwhelmed or that your project load is too high. It’s not only the raw number of projects that can create overwhelm—it’s also what’s expected of you on each project, and how much experience you have with the types of challenges your projects bring you. You can be dealing with a relatively small number of projects and still feel like they are competing with each other and it’s all too much.

That’s okay. These techniques will be great for you too.

Techniques for Thriving with a High Project Load

Get your boss on your side.

Does your boss know you’re struggling with your project load? (Do they even know how many projects you have?) Share your challenges with your boss to whatever extent you feel comfortable doing so. In a healthy work environment, your boss should want you to have a manageable amount of work. Your boss might look for ways someone could help you, or you might just be able to get their blessing on which projects should be prioritized, and which ones can wait.

If your boss isn’t the most supportive in this area, it may still benefit you and build trust with your boss over time if you regularly share which projects you’ve decided to prioritize and why, in the context of keeping your boss up to date on what you’ve accomplished each week or month. Then your boss at least had an opportunity to ask you to prioritize differently, and to some extent you’ll have their implicit blessing if somebody questions your priorities later.

Take breaks, even if you feel like you don't have time for them.

I personally have a hard time taking breaks when there is so much left to do, BUT I have recently started doing it anyway and I've gotten a lot of benefit from doing so. Giving yourself an emotional disconnect from the thing that overwhelms you will help you be more effective when you go back to it. You will likely be more productive and less burned out overall.

There are many different WAYS to take breaks. Here are some of the things I have tried:

• The Pomodoro Technique, where you work for 25 minutes and then take a 5 minute break, a related technique where you work for 52 minutes and break for 17, or any other variation on this that works for you. I have tried several different combinations of focused minutes and break minutes. If you use Apple devices, I find the Flow App to be a pleasant, clean, effective way to keep track of these designated time periods.
• I’ve found one of the reasons I can feel burned out at the end of a work day is because I have a strong preference for ending the day with an empty to-do list. Because of this, I’ve unfortunately trained my brain that wrapping up one task means it’s time to gear up for the next one. If I do this over and over again like a chain reaction, I can end up in a state of high focus for several hours straight. Occasionally when I have a day that I’m struggling with this a lot, I’ll force myself to take a 3 or 5 minute break after every task, or at least before switching to doing tasks on a different project. It’s a bit more extreme than the Pomodoro Technique, but if I really feel the burnout setting in, it helps me hit the breaks more quickly and turn things around.
• Have you ever hit a wall before the end of a workday? Especially if you have a salary position, it can be a good investment in your productivity tomorrow (and your health) to just call it a day early.
• If I’m struggling to focus in the middle of a workday, I might leave to get a coffee and then come back.

What should a break look like? That’s something for you to experiment with too.

To me, breaks are most effective when I’m placing no demands on my brain. It might look weird to others—I might just be sitting and staring while holding my cup of coffee—but if I’m on my phone, I’ve probably just transitioned to solving problems on my personal to-do list rather than my work to-do list, and the break won’t really do what I need it to. I need a break to put me in touch with the fact that I’m a “human being,” not a “human doing.”

But for you a break could look like connecting with another person (talk to a coworker, text or call a friend, etc.), or getting lost in a fiction book that has nothing to do with work. It’s a good break if it recharges you, but you won’t know what that is for you until you try.

Experiment with ways to organize and prioritize your own work.

I've evolved the structure of my own to-do list many times, and each time it has gotten a little more effective for me. Like with breaks, this is a place to experiment. Even more so than with breaks, what works for you might change as the nature of your projects evolves.

Here are some of the approaches I’ve tried:

• Paper or electronic lists
• Lists organized by due date, project, priority, or length of time on my list
• A list that pushes reminders to you, or one that you need to remember to look at
• Giving list items time-blocks on my calendar, or not
• A personal Kanban/Scrum system where I give every item on my list a number to represent its effort level compared to other items (“story points”), then estimate how many items I can achieve in the next two weeks based on how many total story points I think I can achieve…and then improving future estimates and expectation-setting for myself when I see how many story points worth of tasks I actually accomplish in two average weeks.
• Letting AI decide when I do things
• Keeping all my tasks in the project management system where my team works, or keeping myself a separate list on the side

Currently for work tasks, I have a dashboard in my team’s project management software that has a list for every day for the next three weeks. Whenever I add or reschedule my own tasks, I consider what’s already on my list for a given day before I add a new item to it. If I’m falling behind, I sit down and redistribute lower-priority tasks over the next few weeks to make expectations for myself more realistic, and thus keep myself motivated.

BONUS TECHNIQUE FOR MANAGING YOUR TASKS: The tips in my blog 3 Reasons to Wait to Respond are particularly useful if you have a high project load.

Test and advocate for software tools to help you manage the work.

This could be anything from robust project management software for your whole team to a small add-in to software you already use that gives you one new useful function.

One of my favorite software tools is Boomerang. It's an add-in to Outlook or Gmail, and it sends emails back to your inbox when nobody has responded, so you don't need a separate way to remember to follow up. What a great tool for project managers who can typically joke that they “follow up with people for a living”! It’s so simple but I use it many times every day.

For simple software, you may just be able to buy and use it, or it may just require an email to your IT department. For more robust, expensive software, or for software that needs many team members using it to provide value, you may want to develop a more robust proposal. But in many scenarios, software can help you track more projects easier, and/or make your own tasks go faster. Either can reduce your overwhelm.

Build your delegation muscles.

Do you have somebody, like a project coordinator, who you are meant to delegate some project support tasks to?

Some of us have these people, some of us don’t.

If you do, practicing delegation now will only grow you into a strong leader faster. I know it’s hard for us as project managers to give up control. But just try. Just start. Delegation is a muscle you build and an art you master over time. The sooner you start, the sooner you get better at it. Everybody benefits from a good delegator—you, your company, your coordinator. One of the best things you can do as a leader is help the people under you to grow, even as you seek to grow yourself.

If you don’t have a natural person to delegate to, this approach to coping with a high project load will apply to you less, but sometimes tasks can be passed laterally (with the support of your boss). For example, I’ve worked collaboratively with my boss on whether our relationships with print vendors should be managed by our project managers or by our internal print shop.

Talk with mentors for more ideas specific to your situation.

While ultimately, as I’ve indicated above, you’ll need to experiment with different techniques to see what fits for you, mentors can:

1. Help shorten your list of possible techniques to the ones more likely to work for you, and
2. Propose techniques you haven’t thought of.

You might find great mentors at your company, as they will already understand your project environment well. Your local PMI chapter may run a mentorship program where you can find a mentor who works in project management. And if you’d like, I’d be delighted to help you identify some custom strategies to cut through your overwhelm and manage your high project load like a superhero.