How to document and illustrate workload? [closed]

Question

I have come to a point that I need to show my department and others that I am heavily loaded. Thus any task, project, recurring meeting etc. requested will not be possible or take a lengthy time.

I have thought of making a spreadsheet that contains timeslots assigned for tasks, project work, daily routine work, meetings, gruntwork etc.

Also thought of an indicator: I work 45 hours per week. If 40 hours is allocated it will be 88% workload.

Would you have an elegant template for this or how do you show your workload to relevant people at your workplace?

Answer 1

Create a spreadsheet or calendar on a public/shared drive.

Grant your colleagues read-only access and direct them to it every time you schedule a new project for them. That way they can see when their work is projected to be completed alongside the schedule for any competing work which is causing it to be delayed.

If you are using a spreadsheet then I would strongly recommend breaking your schedule into discrete blocks of time. You can use conditional formatting to colour blocks with minimum effort (if cell contents = "..." then apply background colour x and font colour y, then copy "..." into every time block the project fills, delete the text to free up the cell again). If your cells are correctly proportioned this communicates exactly the same information as a pie chart but in a more communicative format.

Answer 2

There are lots of different ways to show your workload - some specific software such as Redmine or Jira mix tasks, time estimated/spend, and priorities and allow you to juggle your workload and allow you to demonstrate estimated times and so on. You can use these tools to output details of a schedule for reporting purposes - including showing how much future workload you foresee.

Alternatively there are plenty of calendar products where you can book blocks of time e.g. Google Calendar or Outlook.

The key is to check when new work comes in, look at your calendar/project management, and say "I should have free time early December, or if it's high priority speak to (your boss/person the work is being done for/project manager) and work something out". Schedule the work in, try to hit your estimated times for starting and finishing the work. If someone complains, or you are unnecessarily overworked, you can use this schedule to prove you are not able to accept new work until a future date; this gives those in charge the opportunity to address the issue by either rejecting incoming tasks, re-prioritising work, or simply hiring more people.

Ideally if you are struggling to fit work in, you need a manager or project lead to be dealing with these decisions for you. Having someone with knowledge of your workload and the ability to manage incoming work will make things far less stressful.