Welcome to Manager Tools. Today's show, Overassigning Work, part three. Here we go. So now I'm going to say it again. We expect work to get done in addition to all of the existing work.

We've already talked we want to assign more work and to all of the existing work.

We've already talked, we want to assign more work

and we expect them to get it done.

We're not to the point yet where we're saying,

okay, there's too much here.

We're saying there's more than what you had yesterday, but more is not inherently too much.

This is not in the show notes for those of you who are premium content subscribers, but let's be clear

If in fact a person believes they're busy then by definition more is too much

the effective manager says no you can be quote too busy or at least busy and I can give you more and it's not too much because we don't know what too much is yet

Because we don't know how good your triage is of the various choices you're making and we don't know if in fact we asked you to do something in three hours if we

asked you to do it in 15 minutes maybe you could get 95% of it done and we could have

acceptable quality while saving two hours and 45 minutes.

This is the heart of what we're talking about. When new work becomes a possibility,

hopefully because you've done some analysis and there's some reasonable value there,

the first assumption of effective managers that this new work will be added to existing

work rather than exchange for any part of the work someone's already doing.

Effective managers don't make work a zero-sum game.

Rather than assuming that something isn't going to get done,

they assume that this new stressor, whatever it is,

will lead to efficiencies in existing work.

Effective managers see new valuable work as a good thing,

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