Managing Personal Activities

Recently, I was asked about amount of activities that someone should be involved in:

- I have quite a few manifold activities, and I'm curious if being involved in such variety of things makes sense at all? Is it possible to estimate percentage of effort, that really produced expected return? Do I complete all the tasks, that are important, on time and in proper quality?

There are some good personal time management theories, that describe how to deal with such "increasing" number of responsibilities. However, there is also some other opinion that doubts if you need to do anything about it at all ☺

So we have:

1. The things (activities), that have to be done
2. The person (let's call him/her a manager), who is assigned to these tasks
3. The team (for the purpose of this article, the team size can be of any size including zero)
   
4. Limited time frame
5. Personal manager's preferences to one or other activities
6. Manager's perfectionism

The amount of work, that manager performs himself, is being controlled... automatically. With time, the manager delegates some of his responsibilities to team members keeping the activities that are:

• most interesting for the manager himself/herself;
• are so "important", that the manager can't afford giving anyone else;
• are so "complex", that can't be done by team members with satisfactory quality.

Actions

Until the manager doesn't feel personal overload and the results are positive, it means that automatic control system works. No correcting actions are required.

If the manager feels overworked, it most probably means that either the team size is too small, or that he/she has too high level of perfectionism. In this case, correcting actions can deal with team size, amount of activities, and the actual person's role.

If the work results are not satisfactory, it can be caused by one of the following: lack of skills/experience, lack of motivation, or recent enormous overwork. In most such cases, I would recommend to reform the team relocating the manager to another task.