Getting a view of your workload
A view of your workload is a self-defence mechanism, and a time management tool that allows you to manage the people allocating work to you. Without this view, it is very easy to get that swamped feeling, and needlessly inject pressure into discussions about workload and priority.
As a programmer, work can arrive on my desk through a number of different channels, and the timelines, priorities, importance and urgency of each task evolve and mutate on a rapid and regular basis, making it easy to occasionally feel swamped.
Like many work-a-day developers, I generally work on a combination of production defects and development projects, but my team also has a rotating general support role – or ‘SWAT’ as we call it (that’s swat as in flies!). This means that, one week in four, you’re the SWAT guy, so the other tech team members can bat over any mundane internal queries and support requests from other people in IT, as well as the urgent production issues. It’s great when you’re not on swat, because you get to concentrate. On the other hand, when you’re on swat, that swamped feeling can be a regular visitor!
We use Jira for bug tracking which is great, and our help desk application can give me a view of the work assigned to me in that particular system, but how do I see all the work I’ve got on my plate right now? What about swat work? This can arrive from shady, illicit sources, such as meetings, emails and conversations, much of which is not ‘logged’ on either the development or production support systems (unless the developer pushes for it). Surely somebody’s keeping track of all this though, right!?
Abstractspoon’s ToDoList gives me that view of my own work, and I noticed recently that I’ve been using it for about 18 months now! This tool has honestly helped me a lot, to the point where I’m becoming a bit of an evangelist in my office.
Although the tool only explicitly promises to give a clear view of workload, I’ve found also has other benefits that are very helpful for a busy programmer. Here are the main benefits for me:
- It’s just the right amount of technology for what I needed. You can simply, and quickly put all of your workload in one place, set a priority on every open task, sort work by priority, and work on the most important task first.
- The critical factor is to reset task priorities when a new piece of work is assigned… ANY work! For me, this involves a discussion with my gaffer about what’s now the most important! He generally appreciates this kind of discussion, as he retains final say over what I’m working on and in what order.
- Closing tasks is very satisfying, but you can also delete tasks when they’re complete! Crossing out a bullet point on a handwritten task list just doesn’t cut the same mustard!
- Linking to documents and web pages is a simple way of grouping all the most relevant information to all the current tasks in one place. That’s a massive plus for me.
- Two or three times a day, I do some orientation, and update the tasklist with what I’ve recently worked on. This might be a very brief text description, or links to new information or documents. This takes less than five minutes, two or three times a day, but it gives me an great feeling of keeping on top of things, (this helps whenever that swamped feeling starts to creep in!)
- Shared workload lists are a simple way to handover task lists to someone else, and this has been very useful for our swat role. Why feel swamped on swat, when you know you don’t have to finish everything by Friday?! (This uses a really cool little version control feature.)
- It’s free!
Other features include estimate tracking, time monitoring, sub-tasks, deadlines, and loads of other stuff I haven’t even mentioned!
Paddy Corry's Blog 
Hi I know you wrote this a long time ago, but I found your page looking for a good way to import a jira ticket into todolist. Have you figured out any tricks?