How to Manage a Fast Paced Workplace

Working and managing in a fast paced environment can drain you of all your energy, burn you out and leave you wondering if you have accomplished anything.  Unless you have a strategy or plan of handling such an environment you may forever spin your wheels and never achieve any kind of success.  I have spent my fair share of time working in and managing fast paced workplace environments, particularly those environments which were heavily operational.  Some of these workplaces keep you busy from the moment you arrive for work until the end of your work day.  You could find yourself tired and drained and not sure if you have really accomplished anything of significance?  A fast paced environment can be outright stressful and may have you running for the hills in search of workdays that are calm and tranquil.  Over the years I have had enough maddening and crazy busy days.  There is a famous British phrase that admonishes us to “Keep Calm and Carry On”.  This is actually good advice if you find yourself working in or managing a workplace that is perpetually busy.  The advice is even better if you have a plan to deal with the pace, the multiple priorities, and the extreme demands that sometimes are seem to be designed to drive you crazy.  Famous UCLA basketball coach and leadership guru John Wooden once said “never mistake activity for achievement”. 

Prioritize your work days by filtering and funneling

I once heard the question, “are you busy succeeding or busy failing?  There is a way to succeed in a fast paced environment by prioritizing everything you do.  First we have to find a way to filter all of the work and initiatives the come our way.  Which ones should we do and which should we not do?  Sometimes we try to do too much because we have good intentions but we end up over committing and under delivering.  One approach to filtering is to put strategy at the center of everything we do.  If you happen to work in a company that have a clearly defined strategy and crystal clear strategic goals and objectives then everything thing you do should be aligned and connect back to strategy.  If you run a heavily operational environment you can actually apply strategic thinking to operational management.  This however can be difficult if your organization only articulate strategic intentions rather than defined strategies.  If you are fortunate to be able to refer to clear strategic objectives then everything you do should be aligned to the organization's strategic needs.  You can use tools even a simple spreadsheet to ensure that your work is connected or correlates to specific company goals.  The approach could be a simple mapping or categorizing and grouping of tasks along different strategic goals and objectives.  This filter can be powerfully effective especially if you are doing something in your busy workday and you can’t point to a company goal that it supports then this is something that you definitely should not be doing.  On the other hand if strategy is not clear and you cannot say for certain that one initiative that you are working on is more important than another.  The tasks that mostly address strategy are the ones that will give you the highest returns.

Along with filtering you can funnel every task and actions in what is called the time matrix.  The late author Stephen R. Covey published a book in 1989 entitled “The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People” which sold more than ten million copies and was a national best seller.  It was through Covey that I first saw the concept of the time matrix which is a simple tool that allows you to funnel your priorities and do the most important tasks first.  If you apply this to your fast paced work environment it might just stop you from doing the proverbial “running around like a chicken with its head cut-off”.  The following quote may help us understand why we may seem to be forever busy at work.  The author of the quote is anonymous but it describes the runaround dilemma.  “because we don’t know what is really important to us, everything seems important.  Because everything seems important, we have to do everything.  Other people unfortunately see us doing everything, so they expect us to do everything.  Doing everything keeps us so busy, we don’t have time to think about what is really important to us”. 

Covey advises us to classify our tasks into four categories; things that are important, not important, urgent or not urgent.  This is a simple but very powerful tool that is organized into a matrix that will help to guide what you do.  By using this matrix as a funneling mechanism it can bring focus and order to your busy workplace and your workdays.

You can consider items in the top left quadrant as necessary items, those in the top right quadrant bring productivity and balance. Those in the bottom left quadrant are considered deception and those in the bottom right quadrant are wasteful and excessive.

We must work hard to keep the unimportant from becoming important and the important from becoming unimportant.  Things that matter most must never be at the mercy of things that matter least.  Anytime you don’t know what your priorities are, you will find yourself in trouble because you will be in danger of making poor decisions. A manager in a fast paced environment doesn’t have to become overwhelmed and discouraged.  By using the advice outlined in this article will help you gain control of your busy operational environment or a department with multiple competing priorities.  First, try to stay calm, then if you are able use a strategy filter first, pick the work that matters most then use the Covey time matrix to truly determine what deserves your most valuable time; what can be scheduled for later and what can be ignored altogether.  Take heart and believe that you can be productive in all of your “busyness”.

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Horace McPherson is an experienced technology professional, a big picture leader and an aspiring writer.  Horace writes on a variety of topics and is a regular contributor to LinkedIn Pulse, peer reviewed journals and trade publications.  Horace is an active member of the LinkedIn Publishers and Bloggers group and also writes regular customer book reviews on amazon.ca.  To be notified about Horace’s new publications on LinkedIn click the “follow” button above this article.  Additionally, click here to read other LinkedIn publications by Horace.