Episode #441: Time Management For Leaders

The reality of business today is that we are navigating the constant tension between Time, Quality and Cost. We don’t have the luxury of concentrating on only one element. They are interrelated and as we move toward one, we move away from the other two. There is no perfect synchronicity either, because business is in a constant flux.

For a leader though、 their use of time is a big factor in their success. Getting things done is a complete function of where they choose to invest their time. You would like to believe that technology is saving us time today. Somehow, I don’t feel that at all. In fact, I feel I am getting busier every year, because the technology allows me to do more and do it faster. The constant hunger for improvements and success keeps driving the pressure of the clock.

In time management, we talk about the Tyranny Of The Urgent. This is when we are being run off our feet, kept permanently busy with one urgent item after another. There is a hierarchy of tasks and we need to understand where to locate the various tasks we have in front of us. Not all tasks are equal and we have to prioritise the most important tasks over the others. This sounds so reasonable, yet so many leaders do not have a good system for capturing priorities and then working on them in the right order.

There is a useful four box matrix for breaking up tasks. In the top left box, we have tasks which are both important and urgent. If we stay here, we will have health issues and over time lower productivity, as we suffer from burn out. In the top right box, we have tasks which are important but not urgent. This is a key quadrant for us and we need to invest time here if we want to be successful. This is where we do our thinking and our planning, our reflection on what we are doing and why we are doing it. The planning process is tightly linked to prioritisation. If we make the time to stop rushing around we can look at the order tasks should be completed and which tasks are more important than others. We don’t plan to fail, we just fail to plan and this quadrant is where we do the planning.

In the lower left box, we have tasks which are not important, but urgent. We should be trying to keep these to an absolute minimum and if we can delegate some of them, all the better. In the bottom right box, we have tasks which are neither important nor urgent. Rationally, we should never spend any time here, but we do. We are scrolling through our social media feeds, checking out assorted random strangers‘ Instagram feeds, watching videos on Facebook, TikTok nonsense and basically goofing off. We should try and eliminate these tasks completely. Having a break is fine, but a 30 minute walk would be infinitely better for us than thirty minutes on fluff from Facebook.

There are many things which steal our time which have a low priority. We must become more sensitive to them so that we can control them. Are we starting each day with a prioritised list of tasks, which we have drawn up for that day? When I am teaching leadership courses, I ask the participants who has a written down, prioritised list of tasks for each day and then work through them in that priortised order? Sadly and surprisingly, very few hands go up. If you are not doing this everyday, then why not? How can a leader get all the things they need to do completed? We can’t do everything, but we can do the most important things at every stage of the day. We must make decisions about what that will involve and then go ahead and do them.

Once we make those decisions, we need to make an appointment with ourselves and then block out that time and protect it, just as we would the time we have allocated for a client meeting. We shouldn’t allow our cordoned off time for key tasks to be fungible and allow other things to break in and steal the time. If we had a client meeting scheduled, we would vigorously defend the time and not allow other tasks to get in the way. Grouping similar tasks together is the most efficient way of getting a variety of things completed. This batching of tasks works well because we cut down the time required to get up to speed on the next task, because it was similar to the last task. We can stay in the flow for longer.

Keeping a close track of our time is always a very scary thing, because we realise how much valuable time we are wasting on low value items. Adding up all of the working hours we have wasted during our careers is a terrifying prospect. We cannot go back and claim them, but we can claim the hours ahead of us, so let’s make sure we do that efficiently and effectively.