A text from a friend made my eyes bulge out of my face like a cartoon character.

Jim Carrey's The Mask comes to mind.

I'm sitting at the dining room table with my laptop and notebooks in front of me. My coffee seems to lower itself to the table. To my right, my phone screen shows message after message rolling in from a friend of mine. Reaching for my phone, I start reading. As my eyes scan the screen-length text bubbles, I see three dots at the bottom letting me know that more are coming. Forcing myself to take a long, slow inhale through my nose I ease my shoulders down while hanging onto my breath. I let my eyebrows fall back into place and finally exhale.

My friend works in marketing and seems overwhelmed by the number of project managers pulling at him regarding a few new accounts he's been added to.

"Are you open to suggestions on how to deal with PMs?" I ask.

Three dots start dancing below the message.

Their reply appears almost immediately.

"Sure."

I'm ready to launch into communication SLAs and when to tag stakeholders for visibility but, before I take off running, I'm thinking it might be helpful to clarify a couple of things.

* * *

ME: Ok well first, what PM or capacity planning software do you use?

FRIEND: I'm scrolling Slack groups for most recent schedules and making my own calendar.

ME: Ok well stop doing that immediately. I’m not kidding.

I would email your boss with a list of every task that’s currently on your plate — not just projects, tasks — and ask which they’d like you to prioritize. CC every project manager you work with related to those tasks.

Say something like:

“Given the recent volume of work and shifting priorities, I’d like your input on how to best focus my time and attention. We don’t have a single source of truth for capacity planning. I currently scan Slack for assignments and timeline expectations on deliverables, across multiple PMs (copied for visibility).

Here is everything currently assigned to me and how I’m prioritizing task completion at present:

Primary focus areas:
Start with 3 most pressing based on timeline for this week only.

1.
2.
3.

Secondary focus areas:
List 3-5 ongoing work tasks and/or follow-ups across this week and next.

1.
2.
3.
4.
5.

Overflow:
Include stuff assigned to you that you will NOT be able to get to in the next 2 weeks.

- item
- item
- item
- item
- item
- etc.

Please let me know if i should be prioritizing things differently.

Looking forward to hearing from you.

Thanks!
[Name]

ME: I’ll help you sort all that out if you want.

ME: Managers don’t actually know what you’re working on unless you tell them. Your job isn’t to juggle every extraneous thing someone throws at you — that’s our job. And we can’t do that job unless you tell us about this stuff. No one expects you to be PMing your task list like you currently are. All that does is slow down your production time & output which makes people wonder what you’re doing/ working on (since they can't see your personal task list and don’t actually know what's on it).

You HAVE to be vocal.

It's what helps the PMs set expectations around when things can be expected to get worked on/ pull in extra help before it’s a problem.

ME: And, if your boss pushes back and says something like “do all of it” (they won't), this  at least gives you a paper trail to say “here’s how much time each of these takes.” It also allows you to defend your job description against work that isn’t yours to do. More than that, it’s what lets managers hire new people to help—it's what gives us ammo to justify new roles to leadership for budget approval because we can actually see a clear need of what’s not getting done.

By NOT doing this, you’re just bailing water on the Titanic... You’re busting ass in ways people won’t see and it’ll burn you out because you’ll feel like you’re just trying to keep up with what’s assigned to you. But, problem is, no one except you actually knows how much is assigned to you.

I’ve seen this a lot—especially on marketing teams—at plenty of places.

FRIEND: Jotting all this down! Thank you!!

FRIEND: Yeah, this would have been huge like 3 weeks ago...

* * *

Unfortunately, I learned most of this the hard way... so I thought sharing here might be useful, too, rather than just in conversation with my friend.

Was it?

onward.

For more on this daily column, read the backstory here. And if you know someone who'd appreciate this, pass it along.