When we step up into a management role, our time management needs to go to the next level.
Most people manage their time by:
- Keeping a to do list that they add to, as things pop up
- Reacting to things that come in (e.g. e-mails and our boss sticking their head in our office)
- Ignoring out to do list and just jumping into whatever comes to mind when we get a spare moment
The most important change is to move from reactive to proactive time management.
Reactive often works well enough early on in our careers when things come at us from one direction (our boss).
But, rather than being driven by the requests of the day, we need to regularly (e.g. weekly) map our work and identify those tasks that are important, not just urgent.
To do this, set a regular time to write a list from scratch of all the work you could do in the next period.
Weekly works best for most people, so I’ll use that as the example, but you could vary it to fortnightly, if you have a job that has more important and less urgent work (but a month is definitely too long).
To compose this list, check in with:
- Your (or your team’s) quarterly goals (if you don’t have any, check out our Quarterly Planning Toolkit): What is required to keep moving towards them and/or to resolve obstacles?
- Your e-mails: What new tasks have popped up in the last week?
- Your calendar: Review last week’s meetings for new actions and the next four weeks’ meetings for upcoming deadlines
- Last week’s list: What hasn’t been completed and is still relevant
Then plot this long list in a two by two Eisenhower matrix, with more/less urgent on one axis and more/less important on the other axis. “More urgent” means the task must be done in the coming week (like, it really must be done, not it would be good to get done).
Then do this:
- Block out daily chunks of time (1.5 to 3 hr) in your calendar for focussed work in the coming week. This is when you’ll start with important and urgent chunky tasks.
- When you find yourself with smaller stretches of free time, go to your list and pull out anything that is important and small, starting with the urgent first
- Delegate anything that’s urgent, but not important
- Delete/forget about anything that’s neither important or urgent
As a manager, you can’t control your workload or expect to get everything done.
But you can make sure you’re investing your time in the most effective way.
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