If you have worked in high-volume operations of any kind, you know how hectic it can be.

Requests at all levels are coming at you constantly, and it can be hard to keep it all straight. The tips and tools below will help you optimize your brain power to be the best you can be; from the basics, you can grow exponentially in any operations field.

1. Utilize your inbox as a to-do list

What this boils down to is get off slack and don’t trust all your tools. You probably have too many of them available to you anyway to keep track of every single thing you need to do.

When I was trying to stay on top of scheduling for every single candidate at my last company, this habit saved me. I had a folder for every candidate with the date of their interview listed. As soon as I was done scheduling and communicating with the candidate, their emails and requests went into their folder, and once their interview was over, all of them got moved into a completed folder. That way my inbox was just what I needed to do on any given day.

My company also had a bad slack culture, which means people would be slacking me updates or project requests while I was in a meeting or doing something thought-intensive, and I always asked them “can you send this to me in an email?”

This ensured that it was landing in my inbox as a task to get done. When you are balancing a billion things as an operations professional, the last thing you need is some request for a new template sent via Slack occupying precious, limited brain space.

Save yourself, utilize your inbox, and create folders.

Think it’s too late for you to manage your inbox? Not true! If your inbox has thousands of emails in it you never categorized or deleted, all it takes is 15 minutes a day for a week or two and you’ll have a clean slate. Create some folders for things you need to reference often, projects you own, or things you’re working on, and start moving things over. You’ll be glad you did, trust me.

2. Use a note-taking app

I used to write everything down. Yes, with pen and paper.

I had notebooks filled with daily task lists, notes from projects I was working on, and 1:1 notes from my manager check-ins. Those notebooks would fill up quickly, and all of a sudden I’d be trying to flip through pages to try and find that one thing my manager said that one time in passing two weeks ago about a project I was finally starting to work on.

There is no faster way to slow down, which is why in December of last year I finally embraced OneNote in all of its beauty.

I have a notebook for current projects I am working on, I have a notebook dedicated to my daily habits and routines, and I even moved my manifestations and daily journaling into a digital notebook. It streams to all my devices so it doesn’t matter what I am working on, everything is right there.

It can be any notetaking app or software, but utilize it. The more of your operational brain power you can free up, the more you will accomplish in your role.

3. Double Check EVERYTHING

It doesn’t matter if you have done a task 100 times, or 1000 times, or 1 million times. Double-check your work, especially when a mistake can have an impact on someone outside of yourself.

If you are in operations, you have stakeholders, and those stakeholders need to trust you. Being detail-oriented is the number one trait an operations leader needs to have, so small mistakes like typos, incorrect time zone conversions, or sending the wrong file will slowly degrade the trust that the people you work with have built in your work.

And stakeholders can be a lot like Mr. Darcy -good favor, once lost, is lost forever.

Bonus Tip: Ask Why

As someone working in operations, you are going to get requests to do a lot of things on the backend of whatever you’re running.

Sometimes someone will just present a problem to you and ask for a solution, i.e. “I need a way to easily order a lunch for this candidate, can you help with that?”

But sometimes someone may ask you to just do a task, like “hey can you attach this document to all internal reminder emails?” and while it may be a task that takes you two seconds, it is often worth asking for the reasoning behind the request.

Take the above example. If you asked why, you may find out that the document being attached is a list of safety procedures that the department leader you work closely with feels are important for people to have access to. Based on that feedback, you can provide another solution, such as a link in the signature of company reminder emails that takes people directly to the safety procedure page on the internal company database.

Now you have to deal with fewer attachments, less work, a more streamlined process, and a problem solved, and you look even better for recommending the solution.

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