Leaders, How To Get Your Act Together

Here is a simple question – are you only working on the highest value items, that only you can do? Some things you can and should delegate but there are others that need your exclusive, personal touch. Isn’t that what leaders should be doing with their time. If that is not the case, then please take note of some efficiency ideas from today’s show.
　
The proportion of children with allergies or dental problems is more than ten times higher in families on welfare than in those not receiving benefits. The Tokyo university study identified factors such as stress, house dust and lack of supervision. In households on welfare, thirty one percent of boys aged five to nine suffered from asthma, ten times higher than the norm. In other news, part-time University lecturers with Ph.D.s are part of the working poor. They get paid a very low amount for lectures, get no pay during holiday periods and don’t get remunerated for preparing classes or marking essays. Tenured tracks are reducing but those entering the pipeline are increasing. In two thousand and eighteen the number of Phds was fifteen thousand six hundred and fifty eight compared to only five thousand five hundred and seventy six in nineteen weighty nine. The number of PHD doing part time work went up six fold from fifteen thousand six hundred and fifty eight in nineteen eighty nine, to ninety three thousand one hundred and forty five in two thousand and sixteen. Finally, one in seven Japanese children live in relative poverty. The child poverty rate in Japan tops all of the OECD countries. In single parent households, it is fifty percent. Among households on welfare the ratio of children advancing to universities and vocational training was thirty five percent less than half the average of seventy three percent.
　
“The first thing is to make sure you are in the moment” says sixteen time tennis Grand Slam winner Novak Djokovic. “That is much easier to say than to do. You have to exclude all distractions and focus on what you are about to do. In order to get into that state of concentration, you need to have a lot of experience, and a lot of mental strength. You are not born with that. It is something you have to build by yourself”.
　
Leaders are busy people and it is difficult to find time during the day to be “in the moment”. Phones ring, email floods in without mercy, staff want a piece of you, meetings suck the life force out of your day, business social media beckons with its siren song of “look at me, look at me”, imminent deadlines loom. Consequently, you often look back on the day and are bewildered as to where the time went and become frustrated with how little actually got done.
　
Excluding distractions and focusing on what you need to be doing are learnt skills. It is astonishing to me how few leaders plan their day. When I am teaching leadership to senior leaders and we get to the time management bit, I ask who plans their day – written down and prioritised? On average I would be lucky to get 10% of the participants raising their hands. When I clarify that they are writing it down in some form of numbered order, a few sheepishly lower their hands.
　
Are they lacking the mental strength to be able to organize themselves? I don’t think that is the issue. It seems to be a general lack of ability to self-organise their day. The first barrier is philosophical – “I don’t want to be locked into a schedule, because mine changes so much throughout the day, there is no point setting priorities which will keep changing”.
　
There is a breakthrough technology for that called the pencil. If your priorities change, then change the order by re-writing to list. “I can’t be bothered doing that burdensome task”. Well if that erase and re-write construct is too much for you, then we have to wonder why you are being put in charge of people and budgets in the first place.
　
The reality is the basic order of priorities will only ever change a few times a day and not every day, so the alteration of the order is no big deal, so get over it. The power of setting priorities, in order, is that you can concentrate on the highest value components of your work. When I was at University, I remember one of the professors showing me a cartoon about the difficulties of sitting down and writing. The ironing, the cleaning, the lawn mowing all were given a higher priority, because the writer was afraid to start and looked for escape routes. We do that in leadership – we procrastinate on projects and tasks we should be doing.
　
The golden rule of leadership time management is “we can’t do everything, but we can do the most important things”. The most high value tasks are those that only we can do – they are not things we can delegate. The key is to concentrate our mental energy to be “in the moment” to complete those highest value tasks without being distracted or hindered. Therefore time must be allocated for the highest value tasks that we have nominated ahead of all the other many tasks. The latter are the lower value tasks, which is where those without a prioritised list, spend the majority of their working lives and are left wondering why they can’t get enough done.
　
To allocate the time required for the highest value tasks, we need to create block time. This is cordoned off time, no distractions time, no meetings time, no calls or emails time. We seize the highest priority work to be done and we throw everything we have at it, uninterrupted and unapologetically. Allocate time in our diaries for block time by diarising a meeting with ourselves that is set in stone. If we don’t do that we will never be able to marshal the time we need for the highest value projects we need to be working on.
　
We also need to create block time for thinking. We can get very tied up in our businesses, busy, busy, busy working in them. We should also allocate time to for working on them as well. That means getting away from the everyday routine and taking a step back. We need that thinking time to let ideas emerge, percolate and galvanise. What should I be doing more of? What should I be doing less of? What can I add in to the business? What can I take out? Time spent pondering these ponderable will be some of the most valuable time you spend at work. You don’t do it now or do enough of it, because you are not allocating the time. The weeds have seized you and you must break free.
　
Leaders, let’s stop kidding ourselves - all we have is time and how we spend it determines all. Let’s take back our control and rise above the noise, to work at the most peak level of effectiveness possible.