Ep 304: Juggling Work When Everything Is "High Priority"

Do you ever feel like you're disorganized or having trouble getting things done at ​work, especially when there is a parade of people showing up with surprise "urgent" work? We'll talk about how to get organized, prioritize, and communicate with your teammates to manage and wrangle this mess!

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I’m Debbie, The Mary Poppins ☂️ of CX and PMF. I consult, train, write, research, and solve problems related to customer satisfaction, product and service strategy, conversion, retention, growth, and PMF. What “why” can I research and solve for you? https://DeltaCX.com

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:54

Welcome, low ego action heroes and phoenixes. This is episode three hundred and four in uh August 2026. I'm Debbie Levitch from Delta CX. Hello, Anna Lucia. And this is going to be a really short one because this one came from a conversation that we were having in our Discord community. And if you're not part of our free Discord community, then you miss this. And I wanted to make sure you didn't miss this, and so we're making it a short video. If you'd like to join the Discord or anything else in our community, just go to DCX for DeltaCX.to. That will give you links to everything from our Discord, Patreon, events, courses, coaching, and lots of other stuff. So the question came in about juggling work, and I've got some notes here. I'm going to read you the uh original post as it showed up in our Discord community, and it sounded like this. It said, I could really use some collective wisdom or practical tips on multitasking and context switching as a designer. Usually I do totally fine when I can focus on just one product or one team. However, I'm currently covering for another designer for two months, and I'm suddenly juggling two teams with about six stakeholders plus developers, all of whom have their own needs, questions, and topics. I'm only halftime there, which makes it even harder, and I feel like slowly I'm like I'm go slowly going insane. We actually planned out a solid two-month roadmap in the beginning that was manageable because there wasn't that much to do. But now people constantly come around with sudden, urgent ad hoc tasks. Does that sound familiar, everybody? Uh that has happened to so many of us, even if we weren't covering for someone else. Uh, we think we have our work planned, and all of a sudden people are showing up, they're on fire, they need everything, they need it 10 minutes ago. And uh so here was the advice that I gave. I'm gonna refer to my notes. Um, if you have thoughts or questions or improvements or disagreements, let me know. Um, but this is what I recommended for what I do. So, first of all, I start by making some sort of table of information somewhere where everybody can see it. That might be Confluence, it might be a SharePoint page, it could be Miro. The tool doesn't matter. It just matters that everybody has access to it. Whether you want to give them edit access, I probably wouldn't, but at least everybody can view it. Now on this page and in this table, I'm going to put the project or the work that you are expected to do. I'm going to put the date that it was first given to me. I'm going to put the due date when people expect it to be done. I'm going to put the key stakeholder and a link to them or their email address or however we might want to contact to that, contact that person. And you could have another column with other people who are part of the team or stakeholders. Maybe your key stakeholder is a product manager or a business analyst. And then in that last column, you're going to put engineers and marketing and strategists and designers and researchers and whoever else is uh on that team. And then you can also include a column for priority, right? Because if you're getting a lot of stuff at once and especially surprise extra stuff, oh, by the way, can you just do this? Oh, hey, I need this tomorrow. Then this has to go in the table and it has to fit in with other things that the same people or other people have already said or also said are high priorities. So maybe you're using priority low, medium, high. Maybe you're using a scale of one to five or one to ten, whatever it is. Pick some sort of system for mapping out uh priorities. Um, and in reality, you can't have everything being high priority. If everything's high priority, nothing's high priority. It's all the same priority. Now you invite everybody to view this page. You remind them if everything's on fire, nothing's on fire because you can't have everything be high priority and need it immediately, and I need it now. If everybody needs everything now, that is a sign to your company that they need to hire. And that might be something you want to tell them. If you expect all of this work to be done today, tomorrow, by this date, look at all these things that are colliding with each other. These are collisions. I'm one person, I can only do a certain amount of work each day. I can only do one thing at a time, I can't do two projects at once. So, um, what's the real priorities here? And what I like to do is I push it back to all of those other people. Hey, I've got these two product managers expecting this from me by Friday. Today is Tuesday. Now I've got an engineer who needs this and they want it today or tomorrow. Now I've got this other person who wants this other thing and they expect it tomorrow or Friday or Monday. All of these go in the table and put them sorted in order of the due date so people can see how much stuff you are expected to do at the same time and tell these people to go work it out amongst themselves. I always tell them I'm happy to do the work in whatever order you want me to do the work. I'm not going to try to claim that I can decide what's more important than anything else. You can all decide that. So you all work out what you want done in what order, what is high priority and on fire and must be done first. And then when I'm done with that, I'll do the next thing on the list. I'll do the second highest priority, whether you want to call it high or a seven out of ten or whatever, I don't care. But you help me reorder this list because I'm gonna do these things in order. So you decide. And if they say, no, no, no, we need everything, then you need more than just me. I can't do all of this in this amount of time, and it's not because of me or something I'm doing. If someone tries to say, Well, you're not very good at time management, it's not a time management problem. There isn't it possible that I've been given more work than one person can handle in this amount of time? It's not about time management, it's not about my skill set. Please, please, please don't gaslight me and try to pretend that this is my fault. You have given me more work than I can do. So either you're all gonna have to get in line or you're going to have to hire somebody else. Whether that person is bored from another team or is a freelancer, we bring in for a limited period of time, a contractor, an outside agency, a new hire. We have to do something, and please, please, please don't let people bully you or gaslight you into thinking you just can't get your work done on time. I would have been able to do my work on time if it had just stayed the two things I originally said I would have done by certain dates. Now I'm getting surprised stuff that's emergency and on fire, and we're gonna have to figure it out. Someone is going to have to decide that what they need can come after what someone else needs. Now, very often we will prioritize what an engineer needs before something else. Why? Because nobody wants to see engineers blocked, nobody wants to see an engineer sitting and waiting because you didn't clarify something for them, or something needs a correction in a design, or they were expecting a uh an error screen and you never gave them an error state. Nobody wants to see engineers sitting and waiting. So usually an engineer that has a problem or is blocked gets immediately made into high priority. I get it, but then we have to communicate to the other people who have all given you high priority things. Hey, your stuff is going to still be on time. Cool. Your stuff is going to be late. These engineers need something from me. It's going to take me a half a day. That's going to push your work out a half a day. I'm not going to have it done on Friday. I will have to do it Monday. And everything has to get pushed out. And uh sometimes you might do a Gantt chart with dependencies. Hey, I am not going to do this work until I'm done with this work. Now I can map that out with a Gantt chart, and I even though this piece of work might not truly depend on this piece of work, in that this they can get done separately, you're not doing one of them until the other one is done. And that is the order in which you are doing uh work. Uh Anna Lucia says they can fight amongst themselves to decide priorities. You're only one person, you cannot do two designs or two studies at the same time. Absolutely true. So I always make other people fight out the priorities. If they drop it on you, that is a problem waiting to happen where magically nobody's gonna be happy with you. They're gonna say you didn't work on the right thing at the right time. Why did person A will say, Why didn't you you do my thing? You knew how important it was. Person B is gonna say, weren't you working on my thing? You know we have a deadline. Person C, who just showed up this morning with a new thing, is going to say, You know, I'm I'm blocked until you do this. You get all these people together. You whether that's a Slack message or a Teams message or a group email, and you say, Hey everybody, this is my list of work, and it's current, and I can't do three things at once. The three of you need to decide which thing happens first. Is the comment section purple or is it me? I think you mentioned I was going to fix it. Now I'm gonna leave it purple. Um, it's actually now gray, and I've made it artificially purple. Hope it's not bothering you. They recolored it. Now it's gray. Um, so let me check my notes. Um uh urgent ad talk task, get it on the list. Is it more important than what person A asked for? Not sure? Get these people together. Jim, talk to Sally. So I can't do both of your work at the same time. Jim is saying it's on fire. Sally is saying it has to be done immediately. You two have to decide which thing happens first. You two decide and you tell me. Uh, I'm gonna keep working on my list in the order in which I have things until someone tells me, ah, we've decided we want you to change your order. So if someone says, no, Debbie, hi, it's Sally. You know what? I don't care if Jim's on the top of your list, you've got to do this thing first. My thing has to happen now. Everybody's blocked if you don't do it. That's cool, Sally. But Jim is also expecting this work from me. Let's get in a group message with him and make sure he understands that if I put your work first, which I'm happy to do, it's going to delay his work. And let's make sure that he's aware of that and hopefully that he's okay with that. And again, if people are not okay with their work being delayed because somebody else had a surprise emergency, hire more humans, get more humans in the building, working remotely, whatever it takes. That's that's it. Um, so yeah, uh, that's why we had two designers. Now one of them's gonna be out for two months. We need a backfill for that person. There needs to be more than one person working on work that's expected of two or more people. So remember, don't let anyone tell you you're bad at this, you're disorganized, you're not using your time wisely, you're bad at time management, you don't know how to prioritize. There's all kinds of things people can say to gaslight and bully you, but the reality reality is this isn't you. In order to prioritize well, you have to understand what's more important than something else. And if everybody says their thing is a 10 out of 10, you can't prioritize that. Everybody's thing is evidently equal, equal importance. We cannot make priorities well when there is no clear sign of what is a priority. If everything is a 10 out of 10, then everything is equally important and you can just pick something and work on it, and it's not you. Push back on anybody saying it's you. So that was basically just going to be my show today. It's a shorty, but I wanted people to uh think more about this. If you have questions or need help, get in touch with me, join our Discord community, uh, contact me for some coaching. The first call is free if you haven't had one yet. And Anna Lucia has a follow-up question. She says, just curious, have you ever started a study or design, and then your priorities changed completely for some reason? How do you get back on track after finishing the priorities? I imagine getting your train of thought interrupted and restarted later can be disruptive. I find that that is really an individual thing. I find that some people are better with context switching and juggling multiple projects, and for some people that's harder. That doesn't make anybody better or worse at their job. That's just different uh personalities and different things that some people are are uh comfortable with and some people aren't. Uh, some people get better at it over time, some people don't. And the bottom line is we have to work with everybody whether or not they're they're good at that. So for me, that isn't a problem. Uh, I'm very comfortable with context switching, uh, I'm very good and fluid with changing things on the fly. Um, I never feel particularly interrupted. It's easy for me to get back to something. It's harder for people to make uh other people to make those switches, and so I don't know what they do to help them with that, but I would imagine you probably have to take some sort of break, walk away from the computer, get the other project out of your head, and say, Okay, project A was done, or emergency thing somebody needed for me is done. Now let's refocus on this other thing. Let me take five, ten, whatever minutes to reread some of the documents and look at my own work and get back in that that space. Um, so I don't have a good answer for that only because it's not something that is um difficult or or troubling for me. But we know from the original question that we got that this person um uh I think was having a problem with that. Let me see if I can look back at the question. Um context of switching. And we can say, oh, I'm not I don't like the context switch or I'm not good at it. Guess what? You shouldn't have to. You you shouldn't have to. You shouldn't have to spend one hour on this project and then one hour on this and two hours on this, unless that's all that it takes. And you're really done, and one hour you can do it, and it's done, and you can move on, versus oh my gosh, all these people want something for me, so I'm just gonna break up my day into all these different pieces. This person can have uh this percent of my day, and this person can have this percent of my day. That's gonna force people to do a lot of juggling and context switching, and not everybody's comfortable with that. And it and it might be better to just talk to your team and say, look, the best way for me to do this is to do this particular piece of work until it's done, and then finish it, pass it to engineers, close the book on it, and then go to the next piece of work. These are all conversations to have with your teammates based on them, the projects, you, your preferences, how you work best, and really just knowing excuse me, knowing how you work best is so important, so that you have some chance at communicating that because what you need is important too. Yes, everybody around you is on fire. Yes, a lot of people around you have no sense of being able to prioritize everything, anything at all, not your fault. We all have to work with uh all of these situations as best as we can and juggle these things. So I would say, especially if you don't feel good at switching between these things, try to organize your work uh with you know your teammates' understanding that you're gonna do this thing until it's done, then you can get it out of your head, pass it to the next person, and move over to do something else. Um, so that's what I would recommend for that. Thank you for that follow-up question. And let's see. Anything else? Any other thoughts or questions? Just trying to fix some of my zooming today. Let's go with that. Um, yeah, so uh quick point. Uh no stream tomorrow, but do join me on the Vocal Coach Debbie uh stream on Wednesday, August 5th. Today is the 4th, 2026. And then we will be back uh next week. Uh Take Action Tuesday. We'll be reading my article on how a job description might actually be a scam. And I think we need to talk more about that and whether or not we want to apply for things that look or feel like a scam. Uh, so as always, thanks to people for joining live or watching these later. We'll play a little a little bit of uh of music to uh end. Uh, and I hope to see everybody tomorrow on the Vocal Coach Debbie channel. Good luck.