3 Unavoidable Overheads Ruining Your Work Plans, and How to Fix It

Do you miss deadlines, despite hustling for all the 40 hours of the work-week and using all the productivity hacks you've heard of?

Do you end up working extra hours to get your job done?

Are you busy with your official work even in weekends, and struggling to strike a perfect work-life balance?

Well, this post is for you! The major reason for the problems mentioned above could be - You're not including the overheads in your work plans.

Our brains are naturally wired to forget about the overheads when planning our weekly or monthly work schedules. We tend to account all the 40 hours in the work week for the core work.

In this blog post, we'll share the 3 unavoidable overheads, and how to account for them in your work plans.

Here we go! The first overhead is..

Meetings

Most professionals forget to include the time spent on meetings in their 40-hour work-week plan. However, they end up spending a significant amount of their work time on meetings either with colleagues or customers.

Meetings are increasingly becoming unavoidable these days due to the pandemic.

So, including x hours of meeting as a part of your work plan is important. The value of x depends on your roles and responsibilities.

For example, if you're a Customer Success Manager, you may be spending almost half of your workday meeting with customers. If you're a Marketer, you may be spending 30 minutes to 1 hour of time everyday meeting with designers.

Sometimes you might end up having unplanned, ad-hoc meetings also. So it's not possible to predict the exact time spent on meetings and include them in your work plan before you start your workday.

However, you can look out for the average time spent in the past week for meetings in your calendar, and get a rough idea about the x for the upcoming week!

Now that we've given enough reasons for you to include the meetings in your work plan, let's jump to the next overhead.

Reporting

The next unplanned overhead is Reporting in the form of KPI sheets preparation or work logging.

All of us love to execute tasks instead of documenting them.

But the management usually requires employees to log their work either in a timesheet or in tools like Trello/JIRA etc in order to get visibility of your work. A lot of professionals are not happy about this, as it seems to be a sign of micro-management and lack of trust.

But if taken in the right spirit, the management needs this information to reward the employees accordingly. The professionals also refer to the work logs and show what they have achieved all the year (especially during performance reviews), without having to remember everything they did.

Coming back to the point, professionals do spend a reasonable amount of their workday in logging their work, or creating and updating a KPI sheet.

Again, the professionals forget to include the time spent on the Reporting overhead in their work plans. So, don't forget to include y hours for reporting in your next work plan.

The value of y depends on the level of details you add into the report. If it's just a high-level KPI report, it's usually 30-minutes per week. If it's a detailed work log report, you may need 15 minutes to 1 hour every day, depending on the number of tasks you executed, and the level of details you add for each task.

Ok, now that we've convinced you to include the reporting time in your work plan, let's jump to the next overhead.

Looking to know the third overhead? Hmm, think. It's not hard to find.

The blogs at CorpScroll is focused on enhancing the reader's thinking and probing skills.

Couldn't guess? Think a little deep.

Here's a clue - We've mentioned it many times above!

Didn't get it yet?

Ok, here's another clue - It's even mentioned in this blog's topic!

You've probably got in now :-)

Yes, the third overhead is the task of work planning itself!

Work planning

The 40 hour work-week's plan must also include the 1 to 2 hours of time you spend on work planning.

Do you feel bad for spending so much time of your work week in work planning. But guess what?

If you sincerely spend those hours with solid focus on work planning, you can block your calendars for each task right away.

The quality time spent on work planning enables you to foresee the dependencies for each task and plan accordingly. It will help avoid the firefighting and last-minute rush, and smoothen the coordination with your colleagues proactively.

So, never forget to include for the 3 overheads in your work plan. This, combined with the right productivity hacks will help you to meet or beat deadlines more effectively.