Driving Your Day: Time Management Tips for Busy Professionals
Two Cups of Tea Career Consulting | Categories: Time Management, Leadership Development |
Business leaders know that effective time management skills are essential to protecting focus, productivity, and professional judgment. While last-minute schedule changes, shifting priorities, and family obligations leave many executives wishing for more hours in a day, there are ways to combat the effects of corporate whack-a-mole while preserving your emotional well-being and executive presence.
Here are some tips to help you effectively manage your time:
1. Hire the right team and focus on retaining them: This may seem like a no-brainer, but making sound, enduring hiring decisions is critical to managing and protecting your own time. Do not rely on traditional interview questions when recruiting your next strategic hire. The best candidates will have been coached to deliver answers designed to penetrate your psychological gatekeeper or those of your internal talent acquisition teams.
If budgetary constraints prevent you from hiring a consultant to control the search, add a seasoned talent selection coach to your inner circle, and enlist their help in drafting customized assessments and behavioral interview questions tailored to your industry and to your specific corporate culture (the second part is the golden nugget). You might also ask the coach to sit in on your interviews to test for context clues the untrained eye may miss.
Once you have hired the right talent, you'll want to keep them. Create customized benchmarks and rewards that are relevant to them, and be deliberate in providing access to invested mentors and high-profile work. Engage a talent retention coach to conduct stay interviews and to monitor your hire's temperature now and again. Your company's investment in your new hire's success does not end once they have started. Keep your eye on them, or delegate that task to a trusted (and preferably external) advisor.
2. Resist the urge to opine: It is an enormous mistake to think that you need to have an opinion on everything. If you are already in the habit of making effective hiring decisions, you will have drastically reduced the need to weigh-in on each topic-of-the-day. When you find yourself being pulled into several conversations, or if you feel that you are constantly putting out fires, the cold truth is that you have the wrong team members in place.
Try gently backing away from meetings and decisions. If the meeting is scheduled for an hour, excuse yourself after the first half-hour and request a briefing if necessary. When you feel the urge to insert your opinion, fight it, even if only for a moment. Soon you will learn that your team really can manage without your ever-watchful eye. If that is not the case, it's time to make the hiring decisions that will benefit your time and sanity (and that of your team's) in the long run.
3. Set a "Kill List" for each day: Start your day by making a list of all the tasks you need to accomplish that week. Be specific and realistic about what you can accomplish in the time you have available. Then, identify the top 1-3 issues that absolutely need to be handled that day, and push everything else off your list, either by delegating to a competent team member or by pushing those action items to the following day. Repeat the same exercise the next day. And the next.
By the end of the week, you will be surprised by how much you have accomplished, and by how much time you have saved yourself by simply getting "the hard stuff" off your desk and off your mind.
4. Be Honest With Yourself. You're stretched thin. We get it. You're beyond busy. Mmhm. You can't imagine squeezing even one more thing into your day. Got it. But see, here's the thing: that's just not true.
Try this: raise your hand as high as you can. Good. Put your hand down. Now raise it higher.
We are capable of infinitely more than we think we can accomplish. It's all about getting creative. The reality is that you do have more time in your day. That 45-minute call you took with your former colleague to hear about what's going on back at the old gig? The quick browse of vacation homes through your executive network's swap section? The business development lunch that lingered for three hours instead of one? Staying on the phone with the nanny just a smidge longer than necessary because she had to tell you about her boyfriend's antics that day? Agreeing to write that letter of recommendation as a favor to a friend-of-a-friend? All of these things add up. And while we are not by any means suggesting that you completely rid your day of things that bring you comfort, peace, and much-needed distraction, we are offering the gentle reminder that sometimes time management is less about the hours in the day and more about your personal accountability to them.
5. Prioritize What You Can Promote: Recognizing the ability to derive multiple benefits from a single task is critical to creating pockets of peace on your calendar. Try to push those things with cross-functional use to the top of your list to free up additional time and resources down the line.
If the plan is to expand your workforce, encourage marketing and HR teams to partner on advertising, and host one meeting instead of two. When stay interviews and upward reviews become a drain on internal resources, engage a consultant to conduct tandem assessments and draft a corporate communication letting your employees know that you are prioritizing their ability to manage their time effectively as well.
By implementing these time management strategies, you will simultaneously raise your ability to increase your productivity, focus, and emotional well-being. Remember to be patient and honest with yourself, and be willing to adjust your strategies as needed. With proper coaching, practice and persistence, you can master the art of driving your day.
As always, reach out anytime if you or your organization could benefit from Two Cups of Tea in the areas of career coaching or workforce development consulting. Allow us to design a development strategy that works for you.
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