“How do I prioritize my work when everything feels urgent, especially now that I'm a new manager?”

That's a question that I get a lot from the emerging leaders that I train and the new managers that I coach. If you are a newly promoted technical manager, you might be feeling that exact same sentiment. How do I prioritize my work? Everything is so important. Everything is so urgent. Now, if you're feeling like you're drowning in that sense of overwhelm, it is not because you lack intelligence. It is not because you lack a work ethic. It is not because you don't have the right tools to do the job. You are drowning in this sense of overwhelm because the cognitive load of your job has exploded overnight.

When you get promoted, you now have a brand new surface area that is much larger that you need to be covering. It used to be as an individual contributor, you knew exactly what to do. Now there were things, you know, outside of that that sometimes interfered. But as a manager now, you have a totally different set of responsibilities. Plus, as a new manager, you're oftentimes still training somebody up to speed on your old responsibilities or even backfilling yourself as your first new hire. So there is a lot going on.

So first of all, we want to just acknowledge that there is a lot going on and that your cognitive load has exploded overnight and that you have all this new surface area. You're now juggling strategic priorities, stakeholder expectations, your boss's expectations, your team's expectations, the people issues that cropped up on your teams, or maybe even the people issues that were already on your team that you now inherited as the manager. You've got technical trade-offs you need to be making decisions on. And then of course, you've got your own work, which most technical managers haven't fully let go of yet, whether it's because they still want to be the smartest person in the room on that topic, or because they haven't been backfilled yet, or a whole variety of other reasons as well. Everything ends up feeling urgent because your working memory is saturated. When your working memory is saturated, your brain defaults to thinking that everything is urgent and you become very reactive instead of proactive. You have a recency bias, so like the last thing to land in your inbox becomes the most important thing or the thing that you feel like you need to do first. There's also the sense of the loudest voice bias. That is the idea that the squeakiest wheel is going to get the grease.

So if you've got direct report or your manager or a client or a stakeholder who's complaining about something to you, then it's likely that you're focusing everything on satisfying their needs, which might not actually be the most and best and highest use of your time. And then there's also Slack notification or Teams notification bias. Again, every time that thing beeps or dings at you, it's a tendency to drop everything and handle that. And there is this false productivity that happens when we just drop everything and handle that. Because if that's not the most important thing to be doing, then it technically is something that we could have put off to actually do the most important thing that we should have been doing. But it feels like progress when we can take some of those easy things off of our plate. It's like when we spend time in email when we should really be spending time somewhere else. It just feels like progress to knock a few emails off or delete them or quickly respond to them.

Again, that's not your highest and best calling as a manager and a technical manager. So now let's just dig into the answer to this question. How do I prioritize my work when everything feels urgent, especially now that I'm a new manager? We are going to ground this in user experience thinking and in executive coaching frameworks. Those are the two places that I play the most. So, and when I'm not on stage giving a keynote speech. So, we are going to ground this in, again, user experience thinking and executive coaching. You could just think of me as your UX-trained executive coach, which is kind of what I actually am. So there we go.

When everything feels urgent, it is usually not a prioritization problem. It's a cognitive load problem. We already talked about that. We already established that when you've got too much in your head, Again, your working memory is limited, and when you get overloaded, you stop distinguishing between what's urgent and what's important, and you just go into that reaction mode and try to get something done. When you're in that space, the brain really doesn't do a good job at distinguishing nuance between different types of situations. It's sort of like everything is on high volume. And that's not helpful in terms of you prioritizing things and choosing really what becomes— what is most important to do next. And if you think of like the, you know, stoplight metaphor of green, yellow, red, everything becomes red.

And this is not a discipline failure on your part. It's a design failure. So we want to look at what's behind that design failure. It's cognitive load. There's a lot going on. There is a lot to pay attention to. As I mentioned, your surface area expands dramatically when you become a manager. There's a lot to pay attention to.

And if you've ever seen that video of the gorilla experiment where you've got two teams passing a basketball back and forth, a team in white uniforms and a team in black uniforms, and you're asked to count the number of passes that the team in the white uniforms make and you're busy counting those passes and what happens when you're counting those passes is a gorilla moonwalks across the stage, but you don't notice it because you're so busy counting the passes that the team in the white uniforms is making. Okay, so that's kind of what's going on when you're an individual contributor.

Now when you're a manager, you know to watch for the gorilla, so you're busy counting the passes that the white uniforms are making, counting the passes that the black uniforms are making. You're watching for the gorilla, you're watching for all this stuff, and it's exhausting. Okay, so we want to just acknowledge that that is happening and we want to get that out of your head because you've got all those things happening. We want to get all of that stuff that's in your head, all of those plates that are spinning, we want to get them out of your head. So to do that, make lists, get those open loops captured somewhere. If you are familiar with the work of David Allen, he's written this great book called Getting Things Done.

It's been around for a couple of decades. I've read it multiple times. I think I've even talked about it here on the podcast a couple of times. But he talks about open loops and how much cognition they take up. And what I mean by an open loop is if you've got something that you're trying to remember because it's not written down somewhere, like, oh, these are my top 3 priorities today, but you didn't bother to write them down and you just keep asking yourself like, oh, what's my next top priority? What's my next top priority? That's not a great way to manage your mind because part of your bandwidth, your mental bandwidth, is spent thinking about those open loops rather than thinking just about the task at hand.

So we want to get those open loops written down and captured somewhere. And when you start to do that, you begin to manage your cognitive load. That's management. That's self-management. That is also managing and leading your team. Plus, it puts you in a position to be more proactive rather than being reactive all the time. Reactive gets us in trouble. If we are just shooting from the hip and reacting to everything that's coming our way, logistically, we're going to mess up. Emotionally, we're going to mess up, and we're going to let our emotions lead us. Even if we don't think we're emotional people, we are going to be emotional or have emotional responses when we are acting purely reactively. And the other thing is it's exhausting to live in that space where we're just reacting.

Okay, so let me share one of my favorite cognitive load offloading tools. Now, this is where I switch into being your executive coach. So I've already talked about this in the podcast before. If you're a longtime listener, you might remember episode 232. It's called Beat Workplace Overwhelm with UX Thinking. And in that episode, I introduced the tool called the Eisenhower Matrix. So I'm going to use that Eisenhower Matrix again here to help you manage that cognitive load so that you can get on top of everything, all that new surface area, and start to make some prioritizations and start to make some distinctions about what you're going to do first, second, and third. So you're basically going to be using decision criteria and you're going to be getting all of that, all of those open loops out of your brain.

Using some decision criteria so that your brain doesn't have to keep recalculating and recalibrating and remembering all these things all the time. So instead of trying to think your way through it every single time, I want you to design and use this simple external system. Okay, so it's called again the Eisenhower Matrix. And because I like a good visual aid, if you're watching on YouTube, you're going to see me hold up my whiteboard here. And so on the whiteboard, we've got urgent, across the x-axis, across the bottom of the matrix. And then, so this is just a 2x2 grid. If you're listening on a podcast, it's a 2x2 grid. And across the bottom, we've got the low urgency to high urgency.

And then the vertical axis is importance. So we'll go from low importance to high importance. And then what we're going to do is with all of those open loops, again, remember David Allen here, We're going to take all of those things that we got out of our head and we're going to place them in one of the 4 quadrants in this matrix. So let me just walk you through it. I'll use some examples from a typical technical manager's day in the life so that you can kind of understand how this works and how this can help you. So we've got urgent and important. Okay. So that would be up at the top and to the far right of the grid.

Okay, when we've got those things that are urgent and important, that's when we feel like our hair is on fire, we need to drop everything and do those things. Let's say you've got a production outage, you've got systems down, and you've got customers, whether they be internal customers or external customers, who can't get their work done because the system that you manage is down. Production outage, that goes right to the top, urgent and important, and you need to drop everything and deal with it. Maybe you've got a key client issue that is spiraling out of control and escalating. Again, urgent and important. You need to drop everything and handle it. Or maybe you've got the performance issue that just can't wait because somebody's behavior or work performance is getting in the way of the team accomplishing its goals or missing deadlines or whatever it is. And again, it can't wait.

You have to drop everything and deal with that. So that is urgent and important. Nobody wants to live there. It's exhausting. But as I like to call that, that's just Tuesday when you're a technical manager. You're going to get some of those. And as long as you can remember, oh, right, as a technical manager, this is what happens, not just on Tuesdays, it happens every day of the week, but to just neutralize it so that it doesn't become so emotionally exhausting for you. Okay, so urgent and important.

Now, let's go to also up on the top, It's important, so it's high on the importance, but it's low on urgency. Some things here for a technical manager might be coaching a high potential team member. So one of your direct reports, it could be documenting architecture decisions or any other technical specifications or anything else that you might be working on. It could be strategic roadmap thinking. This is what I call white space. Having that white space in your calendar gives you the opportunity to work on those things that are important, important but not urgent. This is also where you do your in advance decision making and in advance prevention. So you might be thinking through what might cause the next outage and then proactively coming up with some ideas to prevent that.

So this is where preventative maintenance happens, all kinds of good stuff happens in this urgent but not— important rather, but not urgent quadrant. And this is the quadrant that new managers neglect the most. So I want you to carve out more time in this space. This is the space where leadership actually happens. So again, I've talked about this a couple of times before on the podcast. I talked about it in episode 160, 5 Reasons Why You Need White Space on Your Calendar. And I talked about it in episode 210, White Space in Your Calendar and in Your Brain. We're going to link those up in the show notes so that they're easy to find.

And if you're watching this here on YouTube, we are also going to link this up in the episode description. Now, in episode 160, I also had a free download. You can go to the show notes page for that, which would be janelanderson.com/160, and grab the worksheet that I have for you. And it also goes through like level by level. So individual contributor level, how much white space you should have in your calendar. Manager or supervisor how much white space you should have on your calendar as a percentage of your work week. So go there, grab that download. That's going to be super helpful in thinking about how much time you need to spend in highly important, but not urgent.

All right, let's quickly cover the other two quadrants. We've got urgent, but not important. Okay. So this is when your phone rings and you pick it up. When you get a text message, when you get a, a ding on Slack or Teams and you go respond to it. It feels urgent because it just dinged or beeped at you, but it's not that important because it's usually somebody else's issue. So, when that becomes really urgent is when it's somebody else's poor planning. Again, those quick questions on Slack and Teams end up feeling urgent because something is dinging or beeping or buzzing at you.

Status updates that could have been sent asynchronously all of those kinds of things, they feel they have this sense of urgency, like I should just take care of this quickly, but they're not really that important. And then we've got the not urgent and not important. And this is the administrivia, the busywork that comes along with organizational life. This is email, this is low-impact meetings, this is, you know, proofreading something that isn't important or urgent. Okay, so those kinds of things. Again, I call them administrivia. We need to do them. They need to get done.

Now, sometimes if we don't do them right away, they resolve themselves because you might have been copied on that email along with several other people. Somebody else got the answer back to the person who needed the answer. So sometimes we can just let those simmer on the back burner and they take care of themselves. Now, they don't all, but some of them do. Now, let's just take a step back and look at this matrix. More deliberately and intentionally as it relates to the overwhelm you're feeling as a new manager because you have so much on your plate. If you don't deliberately start to focus more on that quadrant that I said is so important, important but not urgent, that work, you will become a reactive manager and reactive managers create reactive teams. And if you've ever been on a team that is highly reactive and has a reactive manager, that is not a team you want to be on.

And if you've ever been on the client side of a reactive team or reactive individuals or managers, you don't want to be their client either. Okay? So when you use the Eisenhower Matrix and you plot all of your work, all of those priorities, all of those open loops, onto this matrix, taking this approach, your hair is no longer on fire. It's just another Tuesday as a manager. And again, the more you get into that quadrant of highly important and low on the urgency level, you are going to be a better manager and a better leader. So what do we do with this? Well, I want you to right now, before you jump back into your inbox or go off to your next meeting, whatever it is, I want you to draw the grid. Draw the grid just like I've drawn it here on my whiteboard. Now there's a lot of different ways that you can do this. You can draw it on a whiteboard like I did.

You can draw it on a piece of paper. There are software tools that you can use. And you know, there's good old blue painter's tape. You can make the 2x2 matrix up on the wall next to your desk. And then you can put all of the tasks on Post-it notes and you can start moving them around. And in fact, you could start moving them around and say, okay, this one I know is urgent and important right now, but how would I approach it if it was important but not so urgent? How might I frame it and work on it if it wasn't so pressing right now?

Okay. So before you jump back into all the rest of the work of your day, I want you to make the grid right now. And I want you to notice what has been living in that high urgency. Belongs in highly important but not so urgent, and what can you do to carve out some additional time to spend there in that quadrant? Because that, my friends, is where leadership lives.

Now, if any of the items that you drop into the matrix are related to difficult conversations that you've been postponing, I want you to grab a copy of my hard conversations prep checklist. You can get that at janelanderson.com/ /hcc for Hard Conversation Checklist. The link is below in the show notes and it is in the YouTube description as well. So you can grab that from either place. All right, now go on and make that matrix and we will catch you back here next time on Working Conversations.