Overloaded At Work? Prioritize Better Using the “5 Cards” Strategy

If you work in a high-growth, mission-driven organization, you know that “overloaded” can sometimes feel like a way of life. We set goals for the year, but new opportunities or resourcing setbacks often mean we have to do even more with less — and to the same degree of quality. Maybe we’ve even tried to push back on workload to no avail, and so we’re stuck having to be superwoman yet again (especially if you’re a superwoman of color). What’s the impact? Losing valuable employees, working ourselves into the ground, or catastrophic failures that impact our careers, our customers, and our organizations. There has got to be a better way.

To state the obvious…

You can’t do “all the things” forever — not well, not sustainably, and not without cost to you, your team, or your colleagues. You are human and, no matter how amazing you are, there is a fixed level to your capacity. If you think you know this already, here’s my follow-up question, “What have you said no to or pushed back on at work in the last month, to protect time for what must get done?” If the answer is nothing (and you’re overextended), then in essence you’re living as though you can do everything. And we both know that’s a fool’s errand.

Your job isn’t going to make it easy to prioritize. If we agree that you as a human have fixed limits, then it’s quite likely that you’ll need to enforce those limits at work. After all, your organization and likely your manager (even the great ones) wants to get as much production out of you as they can while keeping you happy. If you’re willing to give them every weekend for a month in the service of the mission, many orgs will gladly welcome (and reward) your sacrifice. So if we care about our own sustainability and the quality of the most important work we produce, we need forcing mechanisms to help us protect time for what is truly vital, and steal time from those tasks that really don’t matter.

So try the 5 cards…

If you don’t have full control over your priorities, it’s critical to align with your manager around what’s important. One of the simplest ways to do this is to get clear about the decision-making screen they use internally to decide what’s important and what’s not. The tricky thing here is they likely have never thought about what that screen is — especially for your work. The 5 Cards strategy I created makes it super simple to align with your manager about what’s important, and then use that language to push back on less urgent activities.

Here’s how it works:

1. You ask yourself the prioritization question: What factors should determine if a task assigned to me is a priority?
2. You draft the factors you think are most important and assign them one of 5 card values: the Ace (top priority); the King (second priority); Queen (third priority); Jack (fourth priority) and 10 (fifth priority). For example, impact on our brand reputation or credibility might by your “Ace” card, whereas financial impact might be your “King.”
3. You ask your manager to weigh in: Share your 5 cards with your manager and ask for their feedback. Would they rearrange certain factors? Replace one factor with another? Aim to leave the conversation with a locked set of 5 cards.
4. You pressure-test the cards. Walk through a few sample tasks on your to-do list together and weigh them against your 5 cards. Confirm the course of action you’re going to take given their placement and hear from them to ensure they’re aligned.
5. Going forward, you negotiate timelines and prioritize using the 5 cards: If a task is an Ace, bump it before another task and communicate the why of the change. If a task assigned doesn’t meet the 5 cards and your plate is full, negotiate to delay it until you have more bandwidth. Note: be sure to communicate the why if a pet project is being deprioritized, when possible.

It’s not always this clean, and there are times you have to do things out of sync with your 5 cards, but I find that getting clear with your manager about how to assess whether something is truly important can only help your relationship — especially across lines of difference. Additionally, it may raise to the surface assumptions about priorities you’re both making that you haven’t actually agreed about. Most importantly, this tool can be accountability for you as you decide how to spend the precious discretionary hours you have each week to ensure your extra bandwidth is driving the outcomes that truly matter.

Melanie Rivera is a management coach and trainer and the founder of Breaker28 — an organization that exists to create the conditions for folks of color and others with marginalized identities to thrive at work. Read more of her writing on LinkedIn or Medium.