By Gary Hinkle  

Here's your schedule for today: meetings, meetings, meetings. Staff meetings, project meetings, design reviews, problem reviews, team meetings, even an all-hands gathering. But while you're in all these meetings, your "to do" list grows--deliverables you need to work on, problems that interrupt your day ("Fix this now!"), clients and users who call with more problems, people who stop by ("Do you have a minute?"), project managers waiting for your task and schedule updates.

As if that weren't enough, Outlook notifies you that you've received yet another email: "Dee-ding!"

I hear this all the time from engineers who are swamped with work, trying to understand priorities and find enough time to get things done. I also hear their companies aren't very helpful with this problem, not offering tools and techniques to help their engineers manage the demands on their time and talents.

"We used to have time management classes at our company, but they seem to have gone the way of the dinosaur," I heard recently.

As if that weren't bad enough, engineers tell me all the time they have no method for keeping track of everything, for assigning priorities to work and having, at the very least, a single view of everything that's competing for attention. Some use yellow stickies, some use Outlook's task list, some have downloaded "to do" list apps onto their phones, and others rely on their memories (or the latest drive-by: "Are you done with that yet??")

An engineer shared this during one of my seminars recently: "Our company tried to get us all to use Outlook Tasks, but it has limitations that don't work for most of us, and when project managers assigned people tasks that unexpectedly showed up on our to-do lists, it rubbed us the wrong way and we stopped using it."

Read more. 

(Follow Gary on Twitter: @GaryHinkle)  

LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/in/garyhinkle 

Twitter: http://twitter.com/#!/GaryHinkle