Whether you’re the CEO of a multi-million dollar business, a manager of a large team, a supervisor or a hard working employee, chances are there’s someone in your working life who will try to load extra things onto you. These ‘extra tasks’ are often called the ‘monkey on our back’.

Even in your family or personal friendships you can probably think of people who are good at trying to throw monkeys onto your back!

Meet the monkey!
Monkeys can often seem harmless enough. But in reality they are distractions and occurrences where extra work or additional tasks are given to you by someone else. These distractions, or monkeys, if not managed will stop you from achieving your own important goals or objectives.

A ‘monkey’ is transferred to us the moment that we accept the responsibility for its care. The monkey could come in the form of a crashed computer, an angry customer, a document that needs to copied or a seemingly simple request for help from a friend.

Individually, each monkey thrown onto your back might seem harmless enough, but imagine the results if you were to take on a couple of new monkeys every day…that’s a lot of bananas!

Here is a simple monkey test to see if you could be inadvertently attracting  monkeys from other people.

1. Do people often drop things on your desk and ask you to do them?
2. Do you find it hard to say “no” to other people?
3. By the end of the week, do you realise that you have overcommitted your time?
4. Do you feel like you are a magnet for ‘things to do’ from your manager?
5. Do you find yourself volunteering for things only to regret it later?
6. Do you know that you are just too nice to people?

If you have answered “yes” to 3 or more of these questions then you are in serious jeopardy of damaging your back by carrying too many monkeys. In all seriousness, you need to find a way to get rid of them.

How to manage your monkeys
One of the first things you will need to learn about training monkeys is to use the word “no”. If you feel like you are a monkey magnet then you should start to be more assertive. When someone asks you to do something, rather than just accept their request, ask them to explain a little bit more about the task or what’s involved. If you feel that you can do the job without being overwhelmed then give them a timeline that suits you.

Rather than say, “Sure leave it to  me”, say something like “I have a lot on at the moment, so I can have this done for you by Friday afternoon.”

Final thoughts
Don’t flinch even if you feel you want to. Hold your ground. If it’s your manager asking, you might also want to explain what you are already doing. There are many other techniques that you can learn to master your monkeys. Just remember that being assertive is not only the first rule of monkey management, it is also the most important.

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