Your work isn’t important to us.
That’s the impression you give your customers and colleagues when you don’t move at a fair pace on a certain piece of work. It’s like being on hold on a phone line for minutes because your call isn’t important.
It’s a dilemma I have constantly, how to manage all the different projects I get involved in.
And the response is usually the same, “what is important? is everything important?” and the answer to that, is always “Yes”.
Each piece of work I pick up is important to me and is important to the customer. Not doing their work or keeping them behind, is essentially saying, your work is not important to us.
Is that something you can say?
You have multiple choices you can take to remedy this:
- Do not pick up the work for a start, explaining your bandwidth
- Set expectations from the outset, do not (badly) surprise people
- Stay honest, communicate, and share, don’t hide away
So, the answer to “is everything important?” is actually yes. You were given that work for a reason, it is important to you and your customer.