Even if you have lots of work, if you have a good system you can be very productive and still not be stressed out.

A couple of years ago I was working on the EMEA support desk of Novell, a major manufacturer of networking software. We’d be getting calls from system admins telling us, in various languages, that the server had problems, or that the network was slow, or that they’d forgotten the password, or, in one unfortunate case, that the update they’d just applied had wiped out all their data and they didn’t have a backup. 

We’d be ‘opening an incident’, try to figure out what could be wrong, get the customer to test our suggestions and if lucky, close the incident. If unlucky, the customer would have a major issue and we’d be chased by the customer and/or Novell’s customer managers to provide a solution pronto because, hey, the customer’s network is down, nobody can work, and it’s a hospital, for chrissake! At any one time, a support engineer could be working on 20 to 120 incidents at the same time, trying to keep all customers happy while respecting the differences in support contracts they all had.

It can be difficult to remain productive in such an environment, let alone maintain peace of mind.
 

What helped tremendously, however, was having a customer support tool called Vantive. Despite the fact that this system was highly impopular with Novell’s support staff for being slow, cumbersome and buggy, it did help us work. Here’s what it did:
 

Capture without loss

Whenever a customer would call, the engineer picking up the phone would locate the customer's details and update the incident with whatever the customer had to say. The incident history would then include an entry like "Customer called: wondering when the heck he's going to get a solution". The mail system was also hooked into Vantive, and, later on, the customer could provide updates via a website. Outgoing calls and emails were also registered in this system.

So, rather than having to remember all the details for each customer yourself, you could simply look up everything you needed in the system whenever you were ready to work on another incident. If you try to stuff all those details into your own head, those details will leak out and colonize your consciousness whenever you're trying to concentrate on something else.

The key questions here are:

• Do you have an external system that you can use to store the information you'll need? Or is it al just piles of paper and data all over your office and your computer, without structure?
• Do you actually trust that system with your data? Do you use it, or is it too much bother? Can you find things back if and when needed?

Handle waiting-for's elegantly

Another thing Vantive did very well was keep track of which customers needed attention, and in what order. If you'd asked the customer to provide log files for all the servers, the incident status would turn into "Awaiting customer action". Vantive wouldn't bother you with these incidents. As soon as those log files were mailed in, however, the incident status would turn into "Active", and show up in your Active Incidents list.

So instead of having to glance at all incidents on your plate, hunting for the ones you could actually do something about, you'd only have to look the the Active Incidents list. Looking at 15 incidents rather than 115 saves a bit of time. But, more importantly, since you know for certain that those 15 are the only ones that need your attention right now you won't feel overwhelmed and stressed out with having too much on your plate.

You can take on an enormous amount of work and still not feel stressed if you can easily distinguish between all the work you're responsible for and the things you can do right now to move it forward.

I won't recommend that you install Vantive on your computer. However, having some sort of systematic approach to capturing what's new and differentiate between your work and what you can now do about it, will help make you more productive.

What's your systematic approach? Let me know!