The Leader’s Most Irreplaceable Resource
All leaders are bound by the one constraint the highest-ranking executive on earth has no way of circumventing, the newest employee will not gain a day’s worth of time by being an extraordinary person, not one more second is gained through the most powerful title that no executive in the board room even gets to dream of. Leaders are the ones who create remarkable organizations by making efficient use of their time, even with a heavy workload on their schedules, it is not the number of hours they have but the way they are able to be in the moment and be present at their work that sets leaders apart from non-leaders. In fact, a proper understanding of time management is not merely about learning the art of time scheduling. It is simply getting to understand the leadership aspects of your limited energy and how wise you can be in putting your best effort on the work that moves the mission forward. Besides, to be able to know that kind of work is a major difference you can make. The ideas are not instant solutions. They are time tested leadership principles that have been used in one form or another by the world’s most efficient, capable, and inspiring leaders across a number of fields. And, these practices of leaders have been proven so relevant not only today but in the entire history.
Know Where Your Time Actually Goes
Time management for the effective leader begins by being fully aware of one’s current time utilization and being completely honest about it. It comes as quite a shock to leaders as they discover from tracking that they spend most of their time on the kinds of activities they thought were the smallest part of their jobs. They were thinking all the time that a good portion of their day would be spent on productive and goal-oriented tasks but, to their surprise, most of their working hours went to meetings they couldn’t even remember having prepared well or to the tasks they were forced to pick up without any prior planning. Even when they have some time reserved for deep, strategic work, they get sidetracked so easily by minor, low-priority requests. In reality your leadership priorities are reflected in the time you end up spending on different activities is usually quite telling. The first thing to do to close this gap is to track your time regularly. Keep an honest record for 1 or 2 weeks of everything that you spent your time with noting not just what you worked on but also how long it actually took you and what you did to defer or to accommodate those activities. The results of this exercise will show you much more than the performance review about your leadership focus area, and will offer you the basis to make the desired changes.
Distinguish Between Urgent and Important
Leadership role time management can be reduced to a simple method – separating urgent from important tasks. Management theorist Stephen Covey, inspired by an Eisenhower’s decision matrix, popularized this categorization: Leaders’ biggest threat lies in in reality what is urgent is loud and that which is important is quiet. Tasks which are urgent come out of nowhere with a clamor and leave you with the nice feeling of being needed. Important tasks simply stay there, patiently hidden between the lines of your calendar waiting to be called, never shouting for you attention until you are so negligent that their lack of attention becomes a crisis. Good leaders allocate their time first and foremost to important matters, and secondly handle the urgent tasks within their time limitations only. Such a behavior calls for discipline, setting one’s limit, as well as making other people unhappy at least occasionally for greater objectives.
Protect Your Peak Hours Relentlessly
People who lead and use their time efficiently almost always know at the physiological level that not all hours are equal. There are times during the day when our cognitive performance is at its best for many people, when we are able to think deeply the easiest, we feel clearest in our decisions, and creative insight comes easily and often. For many leaders, this is the time when the day has not yet been filled with meetings. For others it is a few hours later. It doesn’t matter at what time that window for you – you have to treat your time during that window just like a surgeon protects his operating theatre. Do your most difficult and important work during your best intellectual hours: develop strategies, make tough decisions, read deeply, or any other task that demands your genuine attention and not mere reactive management. Do not let your peak hours waste away on meetings, unnecessary check-ins, and the temptation to clear small tasks first as a form of procrastination dressed as productivity. Your most demanding work cannot wait, so make sure that you don’t leave your best cognitive energy for small projects. It just doesn’t happen that way because your peak cognitive hours can’t be repeated.
Learn the Leadership Power of Delegation
One of the most persistent time management failures by leaders is their unwillingness to delegate. It is understandable why they feel so – they know how to do the task and how they want it done; delegating it to anyone else would most likely result in a different outcome. Still, emotionally attractive this line of thought may be, strategically speaking, it is just a bad move. Handling a task that is perfectly suitable for the leader’s assistant not only is a tax on the leader’s capacity for high-level work. Delegating a task is not giving up one’s job responsibilities. Rather, it is an intelligent and thoughtful effort allocation which not only helps a team member to grow but also develops the organizational capability, freeing the leader to get her work done in the right way. So, the rule here is: if only slightly, but eighty percent of the level of excellence which would normally be expected from you is achievable, then delegate it. In fact, eighty percent of excellence which is done by you and your schedule is freed up while another person’s capabilities are developed, is a scenario very frequently preferred.
Build Margins Into Every Day
People who feel like they are the busiest at all times usually find out they simply have scheduled themselves theoretically, that is, they spend the whole time working on what is expected but don’t plan in real life: conversations running late, unexpected developments and situations requiring your attention at the leader’s end that were never agreed upon or even known beforehand. Leaders who consciously plan their day with some space – say, for some buffer time between meetings or for quiet time that they can’t interrupt – discover not only that they are much better at handling all the inevitable hiccups but also that they have more room for creativity, are more composed, and generally present in their dealings with others. Margin doesn’t mean that the leader doesn’t know how to work. It’s rather the leader’s space for leading and creating.
The Measure That Matters
Each time a leader ends the week, the most efficient question for them to pose would be not whether they did a lot of things but whether the things they got done were the ones that really counted. In a leadership setting, proper time management boils down to a matter of alignment, between the areas of your attention and the real parts of your organization to which you are indispensable. You can establish that alignment via thorough self-reflection, planned appointment-making, the ability of the major works to withstand the interruption of the daily rush, and the willingness of the leader to delegate to the team the workload, knowing the capability of the team. When your time and your objectives are moving in harmony, you will find out that other things just fall along the way.