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Your Most Precious Resource

Set Priorities for Your Time

HERE’S A SERIOUS QUESTION: Do you know how you spend your time as a leader? Many leaders that I work with can’t answer this question accurately. They are unable to precisely account for their fifty or so work hours a week. Typical responses include: “I spend a lot of time in meetings” or “I’m fighting fires throughout the week” or “I don’t know; I get interrupted a lot.” Yes, but what meetings, and why? Where are the fires originating, and what can be done to reduce their frequency? Why are you interrupted so often? If you want to break out and move up as a leader, you need to face this question now, while you still have time to develop good work habits.

Do you realize that time is your most precious commodity? Let me repeat that. Your most prized resource is time—specifically, your time and the way you spend it. Here’s the simple truth: To be effective as a leader, you need to spend your time efficiently. Think of the ultimate leader: the president of the United States. The president’s entire day is carefully planned, down to the minute. If it weren’t, it would be chaotic and unproductive and not half as much would be accomplished. Effective time management is essential to your performance as a leader. You need to know where the hours (and minutes!) are going and feel confident they’re being put to productive use.

Prioritize Your Focus Areas

Ironically, the first thing you have to realize is that you can’t control time. The fact is, there are only twenty-four hours in a day, and that isn’t going to change anytime soon. So it’s not time you need to manage, it’s yourself, and how you spend the time you have. Start by getting a handle on where your time goes. This means you need to track it. The study and teaching of “time management” is not new; it’s a big business and there’s no shortage of articles and seminars that preach the use of day-timers, to-do lists, and goal setting procedures. Tools can help, but it all starts with setting priorities.

Here’s a simple process to get started. In your journal, write down your top three priorities. These are the three areas that you feel are highest in importance for you, right now. Because priorities change, you’ll need to do this exercise often. Think in terms of a week or a month; those are the right blocks of time for this exercise. This week or this month, one of those priorities might be completing performance evaluations on your direct reports. Maybe the budget needs to be finalized, or maybe your priorities include the product roll-out, the sales trip, the board meeting, the restructuring communications, or the merger. You get the idea: Priorities are big things that demand your full attention.

As the leader, you have a lot of plates spinning, and it’s easy to get distracted. So don’t identify more than three priorities—part of this exercise is to get you to focus. The only way to be sure you’re working on the right big things is to identify your biggest, most important areas of impact. Now, make note of how you’re spending each hour of the day, in order to track how much time goes toward those three major priorities. For two full weeks, write down how you spend each hour of your day, and see how well you have aligned your time and your priorities. This is the hardest but most critical part of the exercise. It only takes a few minutes each day, but for some reason many leaders simply don’t have the discipline to maintain the tally for two full weeks—those are the same leaders that fail to improve their time management. If this is important to you, stay with it; the first step to using time more wisely is to understand where it’s being wasted.

Two weeks later you should have a clear idea of where you spend your time. If you’ve spent more than 75 percent of your time on your big three priorities, good for you; you’re spending your time on the major issues. In any one week or month, you should spend three-quarters of your time on your primary tasks or initiatives.

However, like many leaders, if you didn’t approach this level of productivity, your assessment is telling you that you’re wasting your most precious resource. Now the question becomes, what do you do about it? How can you eliminate time wasters and maximize time spent on your priorities? There are no easy answers, but following are three useful strategies.

First, you need to delegate more effectively (see Chapter 14). Look closely at your notes; what did you do over the last two weeks that someone else could have done just as effectively? Give it away, and spend time doing that which only you can do.

Second, you probably need to say “no” more often. Decline that meeting that you don’t really need to attend. Push back when your boss requests that ten-page report; ask instead to prepare a one-page summary. Guard your time as if it’s your most precious resource, because it is. Distinguish between what’s important and what’s merely urgent. Many leaders erroneously spend too much time on urgent issues rather than their most important priorities. Resist the urge to fight fires, and stay focused on your three biggest priorities.

Finally, you might need more discipline at the margins of your day (first hour, last hour). Are you capitalizing on this time? These potentially productive hours may be wasted because of your personal habits of starting or winding down a day. Take a hard look at these hours in particular, and make the necessary changes to use them more efficiently. For example, if one of your priorities is employee engagement, rather than spend the first hour in your office reading the newspaper with your morning coffee, use that time to go out and talk to employees.

This brings me to the secret of prioritizing and spending your time wisely: You need to declare your intentions to yourself, to your team, and most important, to your boss. Again, you’re in control here (or need to be). If you’re not willing to identify and share your biggest priority items for the week or month, why should you be taken seriously as a leader? If you’re hopping around from crisis to crisis, or wasting time in meetings you don’t need to attend, you’re a weak role model for discipline, focus, and clarity. Know what you need to do, and know where you need to be as a leader. Figure it out (set priorities) and do it (execute). You’ll feel organized, energized, and productive. Be warned, though: People will definitely notice the change in you. That means you might need to spend some of your time teaching others to be more efficient!

Bootstrap Takeaways

Set Priorities for Your Time

1. Set three priorities for the upcoming week or month, and then spend 75 percent of your time working on those critical focus areas.

2. Start by tracking the way you spend your time today. Make adjustments using delegation or by just saying no to nonessential requests.

3. Get disciplined about your priorities. If you’re not spending time on them, who is? And what else are you doing?