Share with your peers from the Academy’s Prioritize and balance your workload course!
What tactics do you have for managing work overload? What Asana features help you to identify and respond when you have too much on your plate?
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When i have a wok overload. I will do is let them know if i am not finish the in the deadline. I ask them to give me a few days or weeks it defend on the project.
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Thanks for sharing @Jomar_Praon! It’s great that you’ve found successful ways to defer your work when there is too much on your plate.
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@Maggie_Coffin, When I’m overloaded, I’ll ask for help, either through assigning tasks to others, or just being up front with my supervisors and reports. Perhaps you could find out other team members’ bandwith through Asana. It might just require some old fashioned work to get uncovered though.
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@Jonathan_Gaby I agree that transparency and communication are the best tactics when you’re feeling under water. Lots of customers use Advanced Search reports to quickly check their team’s bandwidth before reassigning work to others.
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Being honest with yourself and communicating clearly with others is key.
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Absolutely @behaviorbabe! A great way to help others on your team be honest and communicate clearly with you about workload limits is a focus on asking questions. This article shares types of questions to ask to communicate more effectively.
I will defer till i can delegate it.
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That’s wonderful @Gabriel_Melo. Do you have any tips for how you make sure a teammate has capacity before you delegate a task?
Work overload happens to me when I have too many goals and I cannot complete all goals because they create a different result. A good example is running multiple companies. In order to fix this, I delegate tasks to diminish the amount of work I have.
That allows me to continue working on completing different goals and continuing the movement towards the big picture.
Hiring my team and knowing each individual and their strengths and weaknesses allows me to know if the person is capable of handling the work assigned. If they deter from the assignment, I need to understand how this could have been prevented, if whether or not they are going through work overload or if another reason prevented the work from being performed.
Asana assists in creating a visual understanding of how much work each team member currently has on their plate. This allows me to know a realistic preview of how the work should progress.
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@Ozzie it’s great that you are distinguishing between the exercise of managing your own workload and managing your team’s workload. There is a lot that you need to consider when managing the workload of your team - burnout, individual capacity, interests and strengths, etc. - and Asana is definitely a tool that can help you manage that. To learn more about workload management for your team, check out this article.
When I have multiple tasks due soon and start to feel overwhelmed, I sometimes will look for the lowest hanging fruit – the one or two tasks that will not take much time to complete so that I can check them off. They may not be the highest priority, but because they take less time, I can knock them out and gain some momentum in my day. For me, that fuels me to get the bigger things done! 
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@Paula_Holsberry that’s great. It sounds like your method for tackling the small tasks first is in line with the Getting Things Done (GTD) system of productivity. You can learn more about GTD and other productivity systems in this Asana Academy course.
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Essentially the time management will be variable depending on boots on the ground “getting it done” time frames and adjusting accordingly
Delegate work, thats what team work is all about.
The problem with my boos - Director is that she isn´t a team player!!!
Prioritize the most important tasks while still informing others that they could expect farther out completion dates for low-priority items.
I have to be honest, I do not have a strategy for managing work overload.
I struggle with this. Managing a workload when you are working with clients who have tasks that are always urgent and needed done yesterday is daunting. I have been able to get some of them to specify their priority tasks finally and that has helped. However I still get asked… where are you on X task… 
I am no where on it because you wanted this other task priority.
One thing that helps me is to create a field called “Time to Complete” where I can put the amount of time it takes to complete a task. I try to find the tasks that take 5 minutes or less first and will go through and put “1-5 Minutes” in that field. I will then try to put a “time to complete” for every task assigned to me. “5-15 Minutes” then “15-60 minutes” and “1+hour”. When I do this a lot of times I realize that the tasks that are longer usually have multiple elements or subtasks to it. So I may try to delegate some of those subtasks to other people while I try to knock out as many 1-5 minute or 5-15 minute tasks as soon as I can.