A work re-work: background

I've been in my current job for nearly three years, and I've been very productive from early on. When I first started, I was able to work almost entirely on technical projects. This was largely because I was new and there were very few other demands placed on me. I established some good habits such as logging my work daily in OneNote, tracking tasks that needed to be done, etc. I became “the organized one,” a title I never thought would be applied to me.

For the past six months or eight months, I've felt like my productivity has been slipping. Some weeks I look back on Friday and wonder what I've accomplished. I'm spending more and more time communicating about work, and less time doing it. What good habits I developed have started to slip. I will miss days or weeks of work logs, and my task list is getting stale.

Unfortunately, at the same time the amount of work that I'm expected to complete has expanded during this same period. So now I have more to do, but I'm getting less done. I would guess that these are related. As I've become more busy, I've let my productivity tools slide. That has put me into a vicious cycle of getting more and more busy with less and less support from my tools. It hasn't reached crisis stage yet, but I know that there is a problem coming if I don't change something.

This cycle has left me feeling thoroughly unfulfilled at work. I've read both “Now, Discover Your Strengths” by Marcus Buckingham and Donald O. Clifton, and “Go Put Your Strengths to Work” by Marcus Buckingham. These have helped me to get a better idea of what I'm good at and where I need to be. Unfortunately, I'm still scrambling to try to get my current work done. This leaves me precious little time to try to leverage myself into a position where I play more to my strengths.