Are you being eaten alive by your inbox? Are you drowning in a mountain of paperwork? Are you eating lunch at your desk because you can’t step away from that project? Are you being overwhelmed with work?

On any given day, office workers can juggle multiple projects and tasks while keeping an eye out for email replies and deadlines. It’s enough to make an employee feel overwhelmed. Driven employees fall into the trap of taking on too many tasks. When the usual productivity tricks no longer work, how can you get your groove back and get some work done? To prioritize your workload, ask yourself these three questions:

Is it important?
When you’re drowning in tasks and projects, the very first (and most important) thing to ask yourself is “is this important?” Ask this for every single task and answer honestly. You have to decide what tasks are imperative to your project. Things like ‘answer emails’ and ‘make copies’ are low-value tasks and can wait until you have time to work on them. Be sure you only work on tasks that have a direct impact on achieving your objectives or can contribute to the success of your project. Be ruthless in cutting out low-value tasks, at least until you can get back to a more manageable workload.

Is it urgent?
The next thing to ask yourself is “is this urgent?”. These tasks are usually low value but have to be completed, otherwise, it can lead to a negative outcome. For example, booking a meeting room will not directly impact your project but not having a meeting room can lead to not being able to discuss the project with stakeholders. Make sure to give yourself a timeline. You need not spend a lot of time on urgent tasks, they are usually completed in 5mins. Anything longer and you’re wasting valuable time that should be spent focusing on the more important tasks. Urgent tasks are usually comprised of dealing with the daily crisis. Get them out of the way and shift your focus.

How do you decide?
Here’s a tip: not everything is important or urgent. The business will not fail overnight if you drop the ball.
Just make sure you do not drop a huge ball. Knowing which tasks are important takes a lot of practice and a lot of introspection. You have to be honest with yourself and not blow the importance of tasks out of proportion. You don’t have to do everything yourself. Most people fall into the trap of ‘overwhelm’ by taking on too much and saying ‘yes’ to everything. There are a few things you can do: to push back, delegate, or ask for more time. Each of these can buy you more time to manage your workload.

How about you, how do you manage an overwhelming workload? What are your tips on prioritizing a huge workload? Share your workload management tips with us in the comments. Remember to stay humble and hustle hard.

Written by Jaie O. TheHelp