Overwhelmed with tasks

In Action /

Overwhelmed with tasks

The Challenge

Sometimes we get so busy at work that, day after day, we feel completely overwhelmed with tasks. When this happens, it is important to recognize the problem and address it to stay motivated and productive without unnecessary stress.

It's hard to stay productive when workload gets out of control. Being able to see the root cause of overwhelm and to effectively resolve the issue is a common challenge for team members and leaders.

The Approach

There are many reasons why we get overwhelmed with work, including poor planning, not enough team members to share work with and delegate to, misalignment in skills and assigned tasks, or an influx of new ideas to work on.

To be able to prevent the overwhelm and optimize workload distribution, start by carefully and honestly analyzing all factors that influence how much work you have at any given moment. Look at where the tasks come from, how much work gets done, where the tasks move next, and how much time is spent in communication with each collaborator. This analysis will help pinpoint sources of overload and uncover opportunities to delegate and improve work distribution.

How GoodDay Helps
Visualizes the workflow, estimates effort distribution by project and team member, and suggests new, more optimal work distribution and delegation opportunities.

Detect the workload source

Know who the tasks are coming from and how long it takes each user to reply. You may find that while 40% of user’s tasks come from colleague A, while the average reply time to A is very short. This indicates that colleague A is not necessarily causing high workload. To find out who is overwhelmed and the sources of those tasks, GoodDay allows analyzing the average time to reply for each user and comparing metrics between team members in similar roles.

Detect the workload source

See where the workload moves

See what typically happens to tasks assigned to a user who’s feeling overwhelmed. Some may be getting done (and closed), but many may just be passed on to other users. If tasks often just move from user A to user B very quickly, it may be possible to exclude user A from this collaboration chain and save him some time.

See where the workload moves

The type of work everyone is involved in

To help users who feel overwhelmed, analyze reply time and time taken to complete by user, task and project. Each user may be involved into a task as its creator, someone responsible to complete it, or as a collaborator. These roles are visible in GoodDay and can be analyzed to shift workload from the overwhelmed user who is responsible for too much actual execution work.

The type of work everyone is involved in

Analyze day to day activity

GoodDay helps reviewing daily activity with visual day-by-day summaries and infographics that reveal the amount of effort a user or a team dedicated to a particular project. These visualizations allow to catch work overload quickly and early and immediately redistribute the tasks in a more efficient way.

Analyze day to day activity

Visualize communication flows

To explain how users communicate and collaborate with each other to get work done, GoodDay visualizes all process flows. This granular view allows to analyze if some users tend to respond to others slowly, which may be a sign of work overload.

Visualize communication flows