How the Best Leaders Manage Their Time

How the Best Leaders Manage Their Time

The more responsibility you have, the more people need you. And there’s no way to add more hours to the day. But, when it comes to how to better manage your time, it’s not about how many hours you have. It’s about how you use them.

Here are some proven time management tips:

Be realistic about how you plan your time.

Think before you automatically agree to deadlines. When can you realistically deliver a completed task or project? After considering it, push the date out a day or two. This will allow you to build in “reactive time” to cover unexpected demands that come up.  

Know when you’re at your best.

Good time management means focusing on the things that matter most – and eliminating those that don’t matter at all.

  • Know your best brain time. This is your most productive time for getting heavy thinking work done. Whenever it is – first thing in the morning, after coffee break or midway through the afternoon – plan your day accordingly. If your company uses a shared calendar, block this time out for yourself to avoid others filling it with lower-priority commitments.

Give yourself more space.

Especially if you work in a chaotic environment, space can be as essential as minutes and hours when it comes to time management. See if you can get away from interruptions and distractions by working from home one day a week. Or take your laptop to a local coffee shop and work from there.

  • How do leaders manage their time? It requires fresh energy. For instance, experts have noted that making effective progress on a writing assignment can require setting aside up to four uninterrupted hours.

Delegate.

Multitasking is an excellent skill to master, but dividing your attention between too many commitments becomes counterproductive. You can do anything, but you can’t do everything. If you spread your attention too thin, it will lead to poorer overall efficiency and performance.

  • Determine which responsibilities you can delegate to others, so you can focus on high-priority jobs and the things that only you can do.
  • Only one in 10 managers knows how to delegate effectively. What the others fail to realize is that delegating doesn’t mean compromising the quality of your work. It means finding the right employees and empowering them to build their own leadership skills.
  • Practice makes perfect. The more you delegate, the more comfortable you’ll become with sharing your workload.

Try the Pomodoro Technique.

Created by author Francesco Cirillo, the Pomodoro Technique for time management breaks big projects or to-do lists down into a series of smaller, timed tasks. Each set is approximately 25 minutes, with five-minute breaks in between. After completing four tasks, you get a longer break before moving on to more work.

  • Anyone with a watch or phone can use Pomodoro. Apps like Be Found automate the process by allowing you to write out your entire list for the day and adjust your work and break intervals.

Time management is a key aspect of developing your winning workforce and leadership team.

For additional resources and guidance in all aspects of your talent management strategy, consider partnering with Frontline Source Group. To get in touch with our staffing service in Irving, TX, click here. Contact us to find the branch nearest to you or read our related posts to learn more!

Tagged Blog
Published on Dec 6, 2018