Keeping to a schedule under challenging circumstances takes more than discipline -- it takes a change in attitude Dear Bob …I’ll have to make this short, because I have no time. I’m so buried in work I have to schedule time to go to the facilities. Literally.I’m the CIO for a 60-person IT department (75 until two months ago) in a company of 700 employees (1,000 two months ago). I arrived on the scene two years ago, replacing a predecessor who was, to put it kindly, ineffective. (To put it unkindly, he was a walking disaster and it was contagious.) [ Get sage IT career advice from Bob Lewis’ Advice Line newsletter. ]I’ve been trying to clean up the mess ever since I got here, but it’s so big and extends in so many directions I’ve been stretched pretty thin.To be honest, I was pretty close to collapse before the layoffs. Now I don’t even know how I get through the day. It feels like I’m jumping from one crisis to the next, and no matter what I do, it doesn’t seem to make a dent. But there’s nothing I do that’s optional.Help?– Buried Dear Buried …Welcome to the infinite pile of work. At some point in their careers, most conscientious managers find themselves buried by it.It works like this: Infinity isn’t a number. You can’t add and subtract from it. Infinity minus 3 equals infinity. Infinity minus 10,352 equals infinity. Therefore, Infinity minus 3 equals infinity minus 10,352. This is relevant to you because conscientious managers (as well as non-managerial employees) can always find something that isn’t being done that would be valuable to do. To conscientious managers, that is, the pile of work is infinite.Which means that if you spend your day digging away at the infinite pile of work and measure your success by how much it’s shrunk, you’ll never be anything but a failure. It’s infinite, which means you can’t shrink it.What you need is an outline. And an appreciation for progress. The outline will make the infinite finite. The appreciation for progress will let you manage your workload. Here’s how it works:Take everything you’re doing, delegating, or think you should be doing or delegating. Now find no more than seven subject headings that cover them all.I know you don’t have time to do this. Too bad — do it anyway. Call in sick, claim laryngitis, don’t answer the phone, and ignore your e-mails. The infinite pile of work won’t go anywhere, and the good news is, it won’t grow while you’re gone: Infinity plus 423 still equals infinity. So — find no more than seven subject headings that among them cover everything everyone needs to be doing. Pick three you’ll personally attend to; delegate the others in their entirety to someone else who reports to you. Your involvement will be no more than an hour a week for a progress review, plus whatever political intervention can only come from your office.For the three you’ll personally attend to, create a road map — that is, create an outline a few layers deep to add more organization to your thinking. Then create a plan. I’ve recommended the 3, 1, 3, 4 formula for this before (three-year vision, one-year strategy, three-month goals, four-week plan; for the details, you might want to look at “Secretive solutions,” Keep the Joint Running, 9/3/2007). Whether you use this framework or something else, you need to map out a plan based on a manageable rate of progress. Whatever you need to do is on the plan sometime or other, and anything that needs doing won’t get done until its time to get to it, according to the plan.If someone complains about something or other that isn’t getting done, let them know where it is on the plan and show them everything else that has to happen before you can get to it. If they think it should be a higher priority, let them know you aren’t arguing with them, but for you to change the plan, they’ll have to persuade the affected stakeholders that their priority is the higher one. If everyone agrees, no problem. [ Want help taking your IT organization to the next level? Check out Bob Lewis’s Keep the Joint Running webinar. Its 15 one-hour sessions will give you a whole new, entirely practical take on how modern IT needs to function and integrate into the enterprise. ]Even with your outline, you’ll see the infinite pile of work out of the corner of your eye. If you start to feel panicky about the items you aren’t getting to yet, the phrase “muddle through” might help: That’s what the organization will somehow manage to do.– Bob Technology Industry