Overloaded with Work?

Posted On: 2011-09-23

Well I'm a day late with this column and that seems to be the story of my life for this week. The week started out with so much promise but then about 10am on Monday morning the first wheel fell off and it was all down hill from there.

A couple of jobs that should have taken just a few hours blew out and ended up taking days and that has just put everything else on our schedule way behind. So for us today it's all about catch up and I'm up early to do just that.

So how has your week been? Has it been a great week where everything has come together without any dramas or has your week been more like the one I experienced?

It's time to make a list
If you've been having a crappy week like mine then the chances are that you're starting to feel more than a little overwhelmed as all those jobs that you must do but haven't been able to get to start to bank up.

If you are beginning to feel that way then I have a very simple ... but very effective ... solution. It may not help you get through that pile of work any quicker but it will help you see that maybe that mountain of work you're picturing in your brain isn't quite as bad as what you think.

And the solution is ... to make a list. Grab a pen and a sheet of paper and write down every job that you have to do today before you can think about taking some time out.

They don't have to be written down in any particular order and you really don't have to prioritize them if you don't want to ... but it can be helpful if you really do have a lot on that list.

Once you've written everything down you can see what you really do have to do today and not just what you might imagine you have to do. Once you have it set out on paper it may not look anywhere near as bad as what you were imagining and that can be a good thing.

But writing the list is just the start ... now you have to actually do the work you have listed so jump into it.

As soon as you finish each job that listed on that sheet of paper cross it off. Not only does it help you keep track of the work you have to do next but by crossing each job off once it's completed you're giving yourself some encouragement to keep working.

When I wrote my list for today it wasn't nearly as big as what I was imagining and I've already been able to cross four things off it.

My saga with WordPress
One of the jobs that really blew out this week was WordPress website for a client. We had built his old site using straight HTML but this time wanted his new site to be built in a content management system.

Of course we chose the latest version and a suitable template. Everything went well until he called us to tell us that his site looked like crap when he looked at it on his iPhone ... and he was right ... it did look like crap.

Now we have built WordPress sites in the past and had no problems with the way they appeared on a mobile phone. Of course they look really small and require the user to zoom in but our client was OK with that ... but this time it just didn't work that way. The site looked fine on an Android phone but there were bits all over the place when viewed in the mobile version of Safari.

We thought of taking his site back to an earlier version of WordPress but in the end we bit the bullet and built a simple custom theme for his site and now everything looks good.

So if you're building sites using WordPress and free themes with the expectation that they will look OK on a mobile phone it's time to take a reality check and test some of those sites in an iPhone. The site that you thought would render reasonably well on a mobile phone might really be looking like a dog's dinner.

And all that hassle with the WordPress site showed me something else that really saddens me. These days there seem to be more people than every before who want to produce things that have very limited applications and still charge heaps of money for them.

Don't people understand that if you have a great product and you want to make money then you have to make sure that your product will work across all platforms and with all operating systems?

What is the point of working your nuts off to produce something that will only work on one very limited platform and appeal to few people?