Nailing the basics: How to manage your bandwidth & prioritization

Forget fancy productivity systems: Here's what actually worked for me on my path from IC to Director in tech

👋 Hi, it’s Torsten. Every week(-ish), I share actionable advice to help you grow your career and business, based on operating experience at companies like Uber, Meta and Rippling.

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It’s 2025! If you’re like me, you’re starting into the new year with big plans and tons of motivation. So many things we’re gonna get done!

Unfortunately, soon, reality is going to slap us in the face. Days in 2025 have the same number of hours as those in 2024, and once that initial “New Year’s Resolution Motivation Boost™” fades, we’ll be back to our old patterns and productivity levels.

Time is the ultimate bottleneck—both in our personal life and at work—and the only way to drive more impact is to use it more effectively. In other words, you need to be more intentional about what you work on and when.

Don’t take on every random side quest

There are two fundamental considerations:

1. Bandwidth: How do you decide if you should take on a new task?

2. Prioritization: What should you be working on right now?

Now, you might think “Ugh, yet another productivity post”, and I’m with you — the topic has been beaten to death. But I’m not going to cover any general-purpose productivity techniques like the Pomodoro method here.

Instead, I am going to share concrete things that, in my experience, differentiate people who get stuff done in high-growth companies from those that frequently miss deadlines or drop the ball.

As always, I am going to get very tactical with concrete examples so you can apply this directly on the job.

As a reminder, this is Part 3 of a multi-part series on nailing the basics:

Part 1:

Nailing the basics: How to deliver high-quality work products

Part 2:

Nailing the basics: How to communicate effectively

👉 Part 3 (this post!):

Nailing the basics: How to manage your bandwidth & prioritization

Part 4 (How to collaborate effectively) will be published in the near future.

Let’s get into it.

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Tracking what to do and when to do it

Before we get into the specifics of managing your bandwidth and priorities, let’s briefly talk about logistics.

Many productivity systems tell you to either use a to-do list or a calendar, but I personally find it helpful to use both.

Why do you need both? Isn’t that duplicative effort?

It might seem that way, but I think of them as complementary rather than substitutes. Let’s start with why I think you need a to-do list (whether hand-written or in a tool):

• It serves as a “brain dump”. By putting everything you need to do in one place, your brain doesn’t have to constantly worry about forgetting something

• In addition, there are many tasks that can be knocked out quickly and where it’s overkill to schedule time blocks in the calendar

So, why do you then need a calendar in addition? Blocking time for specific tasks on the calendar serves two main purposes:

1. 🛡️ That time is protected. When I didn’t do this, the day usually filled up with other people’s meetings and random things and I ended up doing most of the important work after 6PM

2. 👀 Time-blocking visualizes your bandwidth. For example, if you can’t find a block in your calendar to work on a task before date X, it’s not going to get done before that (unless you reprioritize)

Note: You don’t have to actually stick to the exact time blocks you schedule. What’s more important is that all important tasks are accounted for. You can (and should) move things around as your priorities change. We’ll get more into that in the next sections.

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And don’t forget about routine tasks: We rarely think about them, but they take up a lot of time collectively.

For example, if you are running a weekly metrics review and you need to prepare a deck, reserve a block a day or two before. If you need to check data pipelines or dashboards at the beginning of the week, schedule time for that.

You’ll be surprised how little time is left for project work after meetings and these routine tasks are accounted for.

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Managing your bandwidth: How do you decide if you should take on a new task?

Whether your team runs a formal process or your manager yells requests at you in the hallway: You need to manage your bandwidth.

Otherwise, you can’t confidently commit to taking on new projects.

This consists of four things:

1. Understanding what you would need to do for the new project

2. Deciding if you should do it

3. Assessing your current situation

4. Working with your manager when you’re hitting full utilization and can’t take on any new work

Step 1: Understanding what needs to be done

Managers often ask vague questions like “Do you have bandwidth to work with Sales on the lead scoring work stream?”. It may seem like a simple question, but you can’t really answer that without more information.

• 📅 What’s the deadline for the project?

• ⏳ What stage is it currently at? Do you need to kick off the project from scratch or are you supposed to help bring it over the finish line?

• 🙋‍♂️ What is your role supposed to be vs. what will others own? E.g. in the example above, is Sales owning the model development and you’re just advising?

If your manager doesn’t have this information, you can offer to do this scoping for them (without committing to owning the work).

This information is needed whether you or someone else will end up being staffed on the project, so either way you’re helping your manager.

Note: NEVER trust other people’s estimate of how long something will take. Stakeholders (and your manager) always underestimate things because they likely have never done it themselves.

It do be like that

Always collect the information above and form your own opinion on how much time you’ll need to do a good job.

Step 2: Deciding if you should be the one to do it

Developing a reputation for getting stuff done is great.

But it also comes with a major drawback: Everyone will just come directly to you with their requests. Why go through your manager or an official intake process if they can go straight to the expert?

Luckily, just because a stakeholder comes to you with a request doesn’t automatically mean you have to do it.

Spiderman knows: With great power comes no responsibility

Often, you can refer them to someone else who is better positioned to help them, or you can point them to self-serve resources (e.g. a wiki article, a query they can tweak, a raw data pull etc.) so they can solve their own problem.

Step 3: Assessing your current situation

Once you understand what the project entails and you decide it makes sense for you to work on it, you need to figure out if you have bandwidth to take it on.

Nobody can forecast accurately how much time a project will take, especially if it takes weeks or months to complete. Luckily, you don't really need to do that.

99% of projects or tasks that come up outside of planning cycles need to be handled urgently. That means in order to decide if you can do it, you just need to understand your other commitments in the next few weeks.

That’s where a well-maintained, time-blocked calendar comes in.

If you blocked off time for everything you already need to work on, and based on the information you gathered about the project, you’ll quickly get a sense of whether you can fit it in.

This is not an accurate science, and it doesn’t have to be. All you need is a rough gut check:

• You have a few hours of spare time in your calendar and your manager wants you to give a presentation to new hires? ✅ No problem, you’ll make it work

• You’re almost booked out for the next two weeks but you’re asked to lead a cross-functional metrics standardization work stream? 🚫 No way that will happen without reprioritization

The goal is to make sure you don’t put yourself in an impossible situation. Adjusting on the margins is easy: If you need a few more hours for the task than you anticipated, you’ll be able to find them by skipping meetings or pushing things to next week.

Not all work is created equal

💡 Pro tip: Don’t just look at the amount of time you have available, but also what kind of work you have on your plate

Squeezing in a few more hours of routine work is easy; if you have the time, you can do it.

But in my experience, you can only really manage one or two complex projects at a given time. The more you have to context-switch between topics, the more likely you are to miss something important and drop the ball.

In addition, most of the solutions to difficult problems come to me not when I sit down to solve them at work, but during evening walks and other activities where my brain is working in the background. And that subconscious problem solving works best when I don’t overload my brain with too many competing topics.

Step 4: What to do when you don’t have time to take on new work

You shouldn’t commit to additional work if you don’t have enough time to do it.

But here’s the thing:

❌ You can’t just say “No”. If you did, your manager would be wondering:

• “Are they truly stretched or just not motivated enough?”

• “What’s more important than this? Can’t they just make time for it?”

Saying “No” is a big no-no

That’s nothing personal. It’s simply because they don’t know exactly what you’re up to all day (and you should be glad that’s the case, otherwise you’d feel micromanaged).

And there’s another problem as well:

If you reject any new project because your plate is full, you’re implicitly saying that just because a project came earlier, it’s more important. That makes no sense.

Here’s what I recommend you do instead (this has worked well for me at any level, even when working with C-level executives):

Stack-rank your priorities, including the new ask, and present your manager with a trade-off

In one of my last roles, I already had a lot on my plate when my manager asked me to create a monthly business review for our function. I agreed that it would be a valuable thing to do, but it was a meaty project and I didn’t have any spare time to work on it.

But instead of just saying “No”, I looked at my calendar and figured out how I could make room for it if I had to. This allowed me to give my manager three options:

This approach comes with a few key benefits:

1. Your manager gets a reminder of your priorities (you’d be surprised how often managers forget what each team member is working on)

2. Instead of arguing over whether you can do it, you’re reframing the discussion as “Here’s what it will cost you to do it”

3. Your making a recommendation (which is expected of any senior employee), but they still get the final say

Try it. Every time I did this, the discussion immediately became much more productive. Instead of being antagonists in a negotiation, we were suddenly partners in solving a problem.

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Prioritization: What should you be working on right now?

What can you work on?

Before you can decide what you should work on, you need to figure out what you can actually work on.

A few years ago, my routine typically looked something like this:

• I opened up my to do list

• After briefly scanning through all items, I decided I should work on a task related to quarterly planning; it was important, and planning was due soon

• After spending 20 minutes digging into the materials, I remembered why that item had been sitting on my to do list for a while: I was blocked and waiting for input from Finance

Going through this every couple of days is massively inefficient and feels like Groundhog Day.

Yes… but I forgot

To avoid this, I now mark all items where I’m blocked with a simple status (and move them into a separate section in my to-do-list):

The key is to make sure you don’t stay blocked forever. So if you’re waiting for someone to get back to you, set yourself a reminder to follow up with them by a certain date.

But be careful not to use “I’m blocked” as an easy excuse not to work on something.

Based on experience, I’d say that roughly 50% of the time when people think they are blocked they are not, and simply need to think more creatively about how they can move forward.

Here’s an example from a few years ago:

A direct report on my team was in charge of competitive intelligence. We were standing up a new program where we’d purchase data from a third-party vendor and then create reports and dashboards on top of that.

We were expecting to get the data in a few weeks, so my report wanted to focus on other tasks in the meantime. After all, you need the data to build the analysis, right?

But there was a problem: Leadership was eagerly waiting for the competitive intelligence reports. We knew with 100% certainty that once we got the data (which we’d paid a lot of money for), we’d get daily pings asking us whether the insights were ready.

And: As part of the due diligence process, the vendor had given us sample data to review. So we already knew what the data looked like!

As a result, there was no reason to wait until we got the full dataset to start working on the reports. We could build the entire thing based on the sample data and then just swap it out for the final dataset once we got it.

The moral of the story: Even if you’re blocked on some part of a project, there are usually other pieces of work you can pull forward to not put the timeline at risk

What should you work on?

Now that you understand what you could work on, let’s figure out what you should tackle right now.

The Eisenhower Matrix is a good starting point:

You should have a good idea of what’s important based on your company’s and team’s priorities and what your manager told you. But figuring out what’s urgent at a given point in time requires a bit of work.

Here’s what I like to do to make sure I work on the right things at the right time:

Step 1: Housekeeping

• I add deadlines for all important projects to my calendar as all-day events (many to-do list and project management tools allow you to do this via a sync)

Step 2: Planning

• Once a week, I look at my calendar for the next 2 - 3 weeks to see what’s due; this includes project deadlines as well as meetings that need preparation. I have a time block for this to make sure I do it even when I’m busy (which is always)

• I then work backwards from these deadlines and make sure that I have sufficient time blocked off to work on these tasks

Step 3: Readjusting

• Every evening, I look at the next few days and my to-do list to see if anything changed and I need to adjust my plan (e.g. somebody might have scheduled a new important meeting, or I might have gotten a new ad-hoc request)

This is a good start, but there’s one weakness: It only accounts for work where a clear deadline has already been set, or a meeting has been scheduled.

If you want to stand out and take things to the next level, I recommend you look beyond your own calendar:

• Last year, quarterly planning kicked off in early March? It’s probably going to happen again this year even if Finance hasn’t reached out yet

• There are a few new hires starting on your team next month? Even if your manager hasn’t reached out yet, you might be asked to help with onboarding

Getting ahead of these things will 1) prevent you from having to reshuffle your entire calendar when they do kick off and 2) make you look thoughtful and highly organized.

The above process works if you have enough time to comfortably get everything done before the respective deadlines. But 99% of the time, that’s not the case: You’re stretched and you need to prioritize. So, what can you do?

Let’s clean up first. Anything that’s neither important nor urgent shouldn’t have been on your list to begin with, so delete those tasks. Out of the remaining tasks, those that aren’t important can be delegated out (if possible) and those that aren’t urgent can be pushed to later.

That leaves you with the urgent and important tasks. How do you prioritize among these?

Core principle: Maximize the ROI of the marginal hour

Most people tell you to rank your projects by importance and work on the most important one until it’s done, then move on to the next one and so on.

I think that’s a mistake.

No project is ever going to be perfect, so with the approach above, you’ll spend way too much time trying to perfect your most important task and then run out of time for everything else.

“Procrastination (Expert Level)”, Anonymous (2024), Oil on Canvas

Instead, try to maximize the Return on Investment (ROI) of the next hour you’re going to spend.

• Should you spend another hour tweaking the executive dashboard you’ve been working on for a week, or should you take something else from 0 to 1?

• Will the forecast get materially better if you keep changing the assumptions, or is your time better spent moving on and debugging those SQL queries you need to push to production?

The simple proxy I have used for years is this:

I ask myself “Where should I spend the next few hours to minimize the chance that my life will turn into a dumpster fire?” and then I go and de-risk that project. This usually means skipping all the things I would have liked to do and moving on to the next-most-important thing I need to do.

If you have time left over, you can always go back and make things better.

Cut your losses

When deciding where to spend the next hour, it doesn’t matter how much time you’ve already invested into something.

All of that is sunk costs and should be ignored.

If a project is not going super well it’s natural to think “I want to keep working on this to make sure the 20 hours I already put in don’t go to waste”, but that’s called “escalation of commitment” and just makes things worse.

Instead, be honest with yourself and accept if a project—or your approach— is going nowhere. The earlier you pivot to a new approach or another project, the faster you can drive actual impact.

Avoid bottlenecks

It’s the night before the deadline, and I open the doc I was supposed to work on for the first time. No access.

Nothing says “I procrastinated” quite like requesting access to a document at the very last minute.

I’ve learned this lesson the hard way early in my career. I still procrastinate (who doesn’t?), but there is a big difference between finishing something last minute and starting it at the last minute. The latter carries massive risk, since you might realize:

1️⃣ You lack context and don’t have enough time to get it

2️⃣ You are dependent on other teams’ input and it’s too late to loop them in

Almost every project at work requires collaboration with others. After we’ve completed something on our end, we’re often waiting for others to do something (review our work, provide data etc.) before we can continue.

The key is to use this to your advantage instead of letting it become a bottleneck

If you scope every project early on, kick off the work and start reaching out to other teams for the necessary inputs, you can use the time while you’re waiting for them to work on other things. The project is progressing even if you’re not actively spending time on it.

Here’s an example of what happens when you do this vs. not (the time spent working on the projects is the same in each scenario):

There should always be some projects where it’s “your turn”, and others where you’re waiting for somebody else to make a move.

Note: This is very different from multi-tasking.

• ❌ Multi-tasking: Doing multiple things at the same time; this results in distraction and lower work quality

• ✅ This strategy: Making progress on multiple projects in parallel through smart prioritization; this is how you maximize your impact without burning out

Be transparent

Managers love reports that manage their own bandwidth and prioritization.

But that doesn’t mean that they don’t want visibility. Put yourself in your manager’s shoes: They thought you were working on Project X and have been telling their higher-ups that it will be ready on time.

However, a Director from another team reached out and asked for your help on a very important, very urgent issue. You decided that this would be the best thing for the company, and delaying Project X by a few days would be a good tradeoff.

Whether you’ll be rewarded or get into trouble for this purely depends on your communication.

If you reach out to your manager and tell them about the fire drill and your proposed change in priorities, they’ll see you as a high performer that manages up well.

But if you just stop working on Project X to deal with the other issue without telling your manager, there is a 100% chance they will be frustrated when they find out. Why?

If they know about your change in priorities, they can either 1) set expectations that Project X will be delayed, or 2) staff somebody else on it temporarily.

Always, always keep your manager in the loop with regards to your priorities. During weekly 1v1s, you can use a simple template like this:

And when something urgent comes up, just send them a quick Slack message. You’d be surprised how much of a difference this proactive communication makes.

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Closing thoughts

You can’t get more hours in the day, so how you use the time you have is critical. This means working on the right things at the right time.

If fancy productivity systems work for you, great. But in my view, you don’t need them. You also don’t need to do everything described in this post. Just pick a few things that resonate and try them out; hopefully they’ll work for you as well as they did for me.

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📚 What I enjoyed reading this week

• Why You’re Failing Non-Technical Data Science Interviews and How to Fix It by

  Tessa Xie
  : An in-depth guide on how to ace case studies and behavioral interview questions

• A guide to AI prototyping for product managers by

  Colin Matthews
  : A must-read for anyone who wants to use AI coding tools to build working prototypes

• How to build an AI side project using AI in 2025 by

  Jordan Cutler
  : The perfect follow-up after reading the primer on AI prototyping above. Jordan walks in-depth through how he built the awesome WriteEdge tool from scratch

• Some advice for your upcoming performance review by

  Hilary Gridley
  : Timely advice for how to make the most out of your performance reviews

• 6 reasons why the senior leadership doesn't take you seriously by

  Anton Zaides
  : Real-life examples from Anton’s career to illustrate lessons from
  Wes Kao
  ’s newsletter — a good combo

• Product/Growth/Marketing memes? Yes, please. by

  Elena Verna
  : Who can say no to a collection of dank GTM memes?