It can be easy to forget that a day will always be 24 hours, regardless of how your project scales. When this happens, the risk of burning out your team becomes more prominent, whether that’s from giving them too much (or too little) to do, or assigning them to tasks that don’t take full advantage of their strengths and interests.
This is where workload management comes in. By building a system that optimizes how work is distributed, you create an environment where teams are excited about producing quality work.
In this article, we discuss how workload management impacts your projects and outline tools and techniques for implementing this effectively.
What is Workload Management?
Workload management is the practice of distributing and prioritizing tasks, whether at an individual, team, or organizational level. This balancing act takes into account factors like team members’ availability and skill inventories, in addition to key objectives set for a project.
An effective workload management system ensures that all team members are assigned a reasonable amount of work—the prevailing recommendation is that they be focused on one task at a time.
Why is Workload Management Important?
Like any other process under the project management umbrella, workload management improves team productivity, work efficiency, and overall stakeholder satisfaction.
Team workload management specifically contributes to employee health and engagement by reducing burnout (or better yet, preventing it), but why is this worth considering?
Think about it this way: employees who are burnt out are much more likely to take prolonged absences, and this is further made worse by their increased risk of developing depressive disorders or physical ailments. Simply put, a burnt-out employee is less effective at work, and that affects the overall optimization effort.
By thoroughly implementing workload management strategies in your project, you help fight burnout by making sure teams have a clear set of responsibilities, a decent volume of work, and enough variety in their assignments to keep them happy and engaged throughout.
Workload Management Software
An important part of building your workload management plan lies in picking the right tools to use—the plan simply falls apart if your team can’t make sense of it. Thankfully, there is a wide variety of tools to choose from, and each provides its unique advantages:
Spreadsheets
Think of the spreadsheet as a blank canvas.
Spreadsheets are the foundation of most other workload management tools, as the grid system allows teams to organize information into meaningful rows and columns. With this, you can make all sorts of computations, which is this tool’s key feature.
While most spreadsheet software now includes ways to easily search for and filter content, it can be overwhelming at a glance, and it might not be the best way to present information, as you would need to manually build different ways to visualize data. Use a spreadsheet mainly if you require more robust computing options.
Task/to-do lists
Task lists (or to-do lists) follow the principles of a spreadsheet but build on it with more specificity—information is specifically organized to act as a checklist, placing less emphasis on computations and more on the distribution of work. In the context of workload management, the task’s name or description, an assignee, and a deadline form its essential parts. At its core, a task list focuses on whether or not work has been completed, and key software features often include a toggle for crossing out tasks—more robust software will expand on this with more detailed statuses to mirror a team’s given workflow.
A task list is a great starting point for small teams and projects, where there is relatively less information to manage.
Kanban boards
Kanban boards are focused on illustrating progress. Tasks are represented by cards and organized into columns, each representing a different stage in the workflow (the most common being To Do, In Progress, and Done). Task cards then hold more detailed information, the most important being assignee/s and the task’s due date. More robust software that offers Kanban allows for other data to be embedded in the task card, such as attachments and comments within the task, to further consolidate work.
A key feature of Kanban is the work-in-progress (WIP) limit, which aligns with workload management principles to reduce overwork for individuals or teams. Kanban works best on projects with a clearly defined workflow, particularly those that are more linear in nature.
Gantt charts
Gantt charts are focused on scheduling—tasks are represented by horizontal bars, which run across a specified time range, which can often be customized to show time in days, weeks, or months. The ends of each bar illustrate a task’s expected start and end date, which is great for inspecting for any overlaps in an individual team member’s schedule.
Other useful features in a Gantt chart include the ability to link tasks as dependencies, which helps highlight scheduling issues if a prerequisite task ends after a task waiting on it is expected to start. Better Gantt charting tools offer drag-and-drop functionality on top of this, so you can easily adjust the schedule to address such overlaps.
Gantt charts are great when managing cross-functional teams, where work might move back and forth between team members.
Dashboards
A dashboard serves as more of a reporting tool, and its key feature is its ability to take key data from other tools and compile it into a comprehensive view. How that information is organized will depend on the team’s specific reporting or monitoring needs. A dashboard is great as projects scale in size and complexity—naturally, bigger projects hold more information, so a tool to help filter through the noise is essential for staying on top of any issues you might face in workload management.
In most cases, using a combination of these tools will be your best bet, especially when working with larger teams or projects. This way, you can effectively gather data, easily adjust parameters, and confidently report progress as you progress.
Tips for Effective Workload Management
Effective workload management isn’t just about assigning tasks; it’s about assigning tasks in ways that make sense and play to your team's strengths.
Below are some tips for making sure your workload management system succeeds:
Avoid overwork
When discussing how workload management directly combats burnout, the rule of thumb is to avoid overloading your team members. This will involve careful consideration of many factors, but at a fundamental level, it’s about making sure they have enough time to finish their work.
Consider the hidden tasks
In addition, it’s important to consider overhead or indirect factors affecting your team members' time: being assigned to multiple projects, documentation, and reporting responsibilities can often become an oversight when managing workloads. A good supporting workload management skill in this regard is creating, maintaining, and interpreting capacity plans.
Use templates
When you recognize patterns in the busywork surrounding your project, templates are your friend. Templates are great for streamlining more repetitive tasks and funneling more time into the bigger tickets. This is especially useful for documentation-heavy projects, and if your team members also have reporting responsibilities.
Communicate
Clear and frequent communication is a universal best practice in project management. It becomes critically important as a workload management skill, considering you are directly impacting your team members’ experience on the project. Regularly checking in with your team, taking their feedback, and adjusting accordingly will play a large part in keeping them engaged.
Manage client expectations
Communication extends to the next tip, which involves careful management of client expectations. Scope creep is not uncommon in projects, but staying on top of your team’s workload gives you leverage, especially when the budget and timeline are more rigid. By having a clear view of your team’s capacity and priorities, you can protect them from having to take on more work than you know is feasible.
Track time
Over time, your team’s experience adds up, which will often translate to faster deliveries, especially for more repetitive tasks. Your workload management system needs to keep up with these changes, and time tracking will tell you exactly how to adapt. Observe the trends in which similar task types are being completed, and use that to adjust your team’s workload as necessary. It’s important to remember that sometimes decreasing a team member’s workload would be more helpful, especially if that means keeping them more productive in the long term.
Workload Management FAQs:
Are workload management and work management the same?
While the two share high-level goals for ensuring productivity and quality, they are not the same. While workload management focuses on optimizing the distribution of tasks, work management is a broader approach that also optimizes workflows and coordinates resources across an entire organization to ensure that all projects run smoothly.
How about resource management?
Resource management, on the other hand, can be more closely compared as an allocation exercise—workload management is about allocating tasks to team members, while resource management is about allocating people, tools, and other resources to projects. We can say that workload management is a process of resource management in this regard.
What are the usual challenges to effective workload management?
The biggest impediment to effective workload management is a lack of understanding of team capacity, which can be made worse when there is no visibility into it. This prevents you from making informed decisions about who does what and when. It’s important to consider capacity planning as a tandem skill alongside workload management.
Multitasking is a common impediment to productivity, especially for smaller teams. Context-switching makes it difficult for a team member to gain momentum on any one project, making it more of a disadvantage for both projects they’re involved in.
The rigidity of important project parameters (namely, scope, budget, and time) can also make workload management especially difficult—this is more so the case for budget and time, owing to the potential for scope creep. An increase in the workload without accommodating more budget or time will most of the time come at the cost of your team’s work-life balance, throwing off the quality of your workload management system.
Lastly, a general lack of resources, whether that’s people, tools, budget, or knowledge, will create heavy constraints on your workload management. Fewer resources mean less flexibility, which cascades into less room for error in the project life cycle. This can easily cascade into missed deadlines and unmet expectations, both for your team and for your clients, further emphasizing the impact that capacity planning and workload management have on one another.
Tips for managing a personal workload?
Here are some techniques you can use when managing workloads at a personal level:
- The two-minute rule - made popular in self-help circles, it’s suggested that if a task takes less than two minutes to complete, it makes sense to get it out of the way. At work, this can apply to things like replying to certain emails or sending out certain reports, which, when paired with templates, can help save time that can be used on higher-value tasks.
- The Pomodoro technique is a popular approach to building focus and momentum, using time blocks and breaks at intervals to aid in concentration.
- Task batching acts as a counter to context-switching, where you work on similar tasks together. For example, you might work on all e-mail-related tasks at once, even if they’re related to different projects, or you might do all research activities in the same time block. This allows you to focus on a more limited set of skills and knowledge needed to complete chunks of work, saving you both time and energy.
These techniques can then be applied when you work with individual team members on their workload—by applying these techniques yourself, you become a good example to your team, and if they can emulate good practices, it cascades into benefits for the whole project and team.
Manage Your Workloads with Confidence using Workamajig
Building an effective workload management system can heavily impact your team’s ability to perform on a project. Carefully planning how tasks are distributed will help prevent both overwork and underutilization, and by striking that balance, you benefit from a more engaged team that can output higher-quality work.
With Workamajig, the premier project management software, you have an all-in-one solution for plotting tasks, allocating work, and seamlessly transitioning into task and resource management. Adjust workloads with ease, then use built-in collaboration and reporting tools to ensure that your team stays on top of the work, completing tasks and addressing roadblocks along the way.
Originally published August 7, 2025.