I’ve been in IT for nearly 10 years. The first half was in-house IT and the second with a managed service provider (MSP). Working for an MSP has a myriad of challenges as it relates to managing your workload. Requests are coming in from all over the place. The Project Management team is assigning you new projects and tasks, senior leadership is pushing forward with their greater initiatives across the Organization. Clients are submitting trouble tickets. You need to renew your certification to maintain your vendor partner status and alerts are coming in left and right with things you need to address. The list goes on and on and on. This doesn’t even include everything that is going on in your personal life such as your children’s extracurricular activities, your dentist appointments or your honey to-do list.

This may sound stressful, and it is at times. Previously I had used various methods of time blocking on my calendar to ensure I could get everything done. If a project was assigned to me I would take all of the tasks, review the estimated time it would take to complete the task and create a calendar event in Outlook. This essentially blocked out time and reserved it for that task. In theory it was a great idea, but in practice it wasn’t flexible and it was ridiculously difficult to maintain regularly. I had one hour of my time set aside each Friday just to plan out and time-block my work for the upcoming week.

My routine time-blocking exercise was becoming a problem. I spent a considerable amount of time planning my week just to have my “plan” blow up. The fires for the day have now taken priority over the other tasks I had planned which left me frustrated, unorganized and less empowered to say “no”. I was trying to figure out how to get these new tasks done and complete the rest of my deliverables for the week. This occurred way more than I wanted, but it was the reality that existed. How do I make it easier to plan? How do I create flexibility in my scheduling? How do I save time?