If you do a 100% desk job, how busy is your day? Tasks, reports etc.

[JMAngel1]

I’m just trying to get some perspective for my own working day.

I am 80% clinical and then if I’m lucky 20% “desk time” (which often gets eroded by departmental diversions). During this desk time, I feel completely overwhelmed by the volume of work and often feel frozen into inactivity just picking off the low hanging fruit instead of dealing with the larger more complex pieces of work. Partly this is due to having to grab snatches of time here and there throughout the day so I never feel like I can sit down and get my head around a project properly before I’m interrupted with patient work.

If your job is 100% desk time, could you let me know roughly how many tasks (and how big they are) you complete in a general 9-5pm day and vaguely what they involve. I just need to know if I’m setting myself up to fail and need to agree less clinical time with my line manager.

I can see how it works be hard to set something up when not 100% desk. No junior staff ?

That workload doesn't seem sustainable to me. I think you need to sit down with your line manager, go through all the demands on your time, and make it clear that they need to decide what your work priorities are. Once they are aware of all these strings pulling you in different directions, they will have to put some sort of system in place to enable you to concentrate on the important stuff without constant interruptions and distractions.

This sounds like the dream.

It does sound like your workload is quite unmanageable. I am in healthcare management (non clinical) and my workload and the expectations of what I can achieve in a day are just not realistic and I feel a lot of stress related to this, feeling like I'm constantly teetering on the edge of burnout.

However, I do have some tools to help me do the work of 2 people in 'only' 50 hours or so.

Firstly set priorities that are aligned to your overall goals and objectives. Eg. Maintain safe services
Priorities could be: manage risks, ensure incidents are investigated in a timely way, share learning from CG issues.

Then time block for those things. Fill your diary so people can see you are not available. You may or may not have admin support but don't let people add stuff to your diary in this blocked time. If you have regular meetings put these in first.

Consider whether meetings are useful, or essential for you to attend. Could someone else go and feed back? Could you read the minutes and action any requests for information etc? If if is a long meeting (our governance meetings can be 3h) can you just attend for part of it to do your update or hear the sections relevant to your work?

If you need to sit through a teams meeting where not all the chat is relevant to your role, do low energy tasks whilst the meeting is ongoing. I sign off time sheets and expenses, approve orders and read and delete emails during this type of meeting. Anything I can do within 2 minutes, essentially.

There is also a people element. It is so easy to be distracted by calls and drop ins to your office. Could you work from somewhere else, including home even one day a week? Or get a lovely big sign for your door saying meetings in progress, do not disturb. If you're in a shared office, put on headphones. Even if you're not on a meeting or listening to music it will make you appear unavailable and therefore less likely to be disrupted. Set expectations with your team around the kinds of interruptions you're happy to have (building on fire, CQC are in, someone has brought a baby/cake). Tell them when you will be available Eg. Mid morning coffee break or at lunchtime. Tell your manager you are struggling and ask for support.

I also recommend a book called 168 hours by Laura Vanderkam which has lots of practical advice for managing your time to get a balance of everything you need to do. The author also has a podcast of 5 minute episodes called Before Breakfast.

My job is from home a lot of the time. We are short staffed and there is a lot of covering for lack of staff as well as of training and reviewing new joiners outputs, which is on top of my actual work load. I have discussed regularly with my manager and we are delaying and then delaying again the tasks I’m supposed to complete this year. It basically results in my team providing a rubbish service but it’s all we can do, I’m just one human and the new joiners are good but naturally take time to get up to speed.Sadly OP we haven’t cracked it yet, and I honestly don’t see how we could but at least I don’t feel personally responsible. Without a sensible manager I would either have left or been under severe stress. Communication is key.

Mines a mix of research/auditing and admin.
It really depends on what comes in, sometimes a lot of admin tasks come in and I do 6 or 7 in a day, sometimes I do audit tasks and it takes me a day or two, research is on going (often waiting for people to respond to my emails).
It really depends on the role though, in mine it's more important that I do a few things a day but perfectly than do lots but make even little mistakes.

I'm busy but our office culture is very much that people should take their lunchbreaks and finish on time.

Regarding emails. Do you have Outlook? There is a clean up function which removes trails so essentially you have one email for a trail rather than the 20 replies. This helps mentally. You can set a time for email. Deal with easy ones immediately. Use the flag function to colour code harder ones and book in calender, or create a task, or delegate. Send a holding reply if you have to.

Remove stuff from your inbox.

I do a fully WFH desk job and would say I have it pretty easy. My role isn't particularly task based, more strategy, and I also act as an escalation point for more complex requests and queries.

My working day will typically be around 50% meetings (to provide advice and guidance, I don't tend to have my own actions from said meetings) and the rest responding to emails, reviewing the odd document and providing feedback, pulling together slides for a presentation, etc.

I've never felt overworked, or had to do any work in my own time. Although technically, I work for a global company so have to take the occasional meeting calls outside of 9-5 hours, in which case I'd just claim the time back.

As I say once every 2 weeks. Most days it's juggling meetings as well.

It sounds like you have too much to do. I could easily spend the 90 minutes replying to emails or messages from a colleagues.

A problem I have is that my role is involved in a lot of other teams, which means I get all the messages. I have always been a very diligent person, first to respond type, trying to keep on top of it all. But I think I am probably a fool. Other people let the exchange happen, wait until the issue is sorted and then respond, or don't. It doesn't seem to do them any harm.

Also, a huge waste of time at my work is the way we are copied into emails but it isn't clear whose job it is to respond/ action the request, which means several people get involved.

So, I wonder, would it be possible in your job to do emails Mon, Wed and Fri, and on Tue and Thur use your 90 minutes on set work? You would probably need to tell your team you are working in this way and see how it goes.

This is why I check my emails twice a day at 9:30/10 when hopefully have already done 2 hours good productive work and at 4pm.

It depends on your workload, surely. I've always had a desk job. Some jobs I have been overwhelmingly busy where I'm having to process 100s of pieces of paper a day to a very high standard with attention to detail. I loved how busy I was, the weeks flew by and I stayed there for 6yrs. After I left, they struggled to employ someone for years that could keep up with the fast paced environment.
My current role is completely different and reactive to emails and phone calls with an hour or so of computer work a day. There are some days where I don't receive any emails other than spam and my only calls are sales spam calls.

I'm in a customer service job for an energy company. We receive thousands of calls and emails a day so I sit at the computer and answer those all day!

100% desk based, answering emails, my own inbox and our team inbox, also an enquiries basket, settling trades, making payments - I get my 1 hour lunch but it is always full on

Everything is designed to be paperless so all work/post gets uploaded to each team to work on