The Role of Time Management in Developing Leadership Skills
Most people find the idea of time management to be about as exciting as taking out the garbage. Maybe that's because it is. But if you're looking to become a better leader, there's a good chance you'll need to develop your time management skills in order to get there.
In this blog post, we'll talk about some of the basics of time management and how it can help you become a better leader. Along the way, we'll give you tips on how to keep track of what you do with your time so that organizing yourself is easier and more effective.
What exactly is Time Management?
Time management is the process of monitoring and controlling the amount of time you spend on tasks, projects, activities and other things in your life that require your attention. Managing your time effectively can be a challenge for most people. But if you're a leader, it's nearly impossible to succeed without it. Your role as a leader requires that you get tasks done efficiently and effectively so that the people on your team can do their jobs more effectively as well. But if you don't know how best to manage your own time, it's unlikely that you'll ever be able to manage anyone else's time with any degree of success.
How Does Exceptional Time Management Lead to Effective Leadership?
Effective leaders know how to manage their time in a way that allows them to get the most out of each and every day. By effectively managing their time, exceptional leaders are able to set goals, prioritize tasks and projects, manage stress, build organizational skills and increase productivity in all aspects of their life. Because they know how to manage their time in an effective way, exceptional leaders are able to avoid distractions by avoiding procrastination. By avoiding procrastination, they're also able to accomplish more on a daily basis.
Is There a Formula for Managing Your Time?
Not exactly. But there are some basic guidelines that you can use to help you with your time management efforts. We'll talk about a few of them below.
Work in Sprints to Achieve Your Goals Faster: Maintaining constant focus on achieving your daily goals can be exhausting. It's easy to get distracted by the activities and tasks that are part of your daily routine and lose site of why you're really doing them in the first place. One of the keys to successful time management is to work in short bursts – or "sprints" – instead of spending long periods at a time working on one thing at a time. The key is to work quickly and finish your tasks so that you can move on to the next task without losing focus.
Identify What You Can Do Now: Very often, our expectations are much too high. We think we can do a lot more than we actually can. When you get bogged down with a task, ask yourself if what you're doing now is really giving you the results that you want. Is it contributing to your goal or vision? If not, then moving on to something else might be the best solution for now. You can always come back and re-evaluate in a few days or weeks when things have calmed down if need be.
Focus on Action: Don't spend your time thinking about what you should do next. That can cause stress and lead to procrastination so you can't get things done. Instead, focus on taking small steps towards your goal and then take another small step after that. From there, you can work on achieving even more small steps which will gradually transform into larger ones if all goes well.
Reevaluate Your Time Management Routine Every 90 Days: In the beginning stages of learning how to manage time better, it can be hard to know if your routine is effective or not. The best way to know for sure is to take an honest look at your routine and reevaluate it every 90 days. If you find that even after a month or two, you're still not getting what you want out of your time management efforts, it might be time to change things up a bit.
Remember that becoming a great leader is an ongoing process that requires a lot of hard work and dedication. You'll need to continue to refine your time management skills over the course of your leadership career so that you can become a more effective leader every day. But with these tips, you'll be well on your way to knowing how to better manage time and lead people towards bigger and better things.
What Does Exceptional Time Management Look Like?
In the video above, Chris Bailey shares his experience developing his exceptional time management with me. In it, we talk about why he had a hard time putting priorities on his tasks in the past, and how he made changes in order to improve his ability to make decisions about what he needed to do. Here are some of his biggest insights:
Organize your work in a way that makes sense for you. Chris constantly updates his Google Calendar and uses it to organize his week, especially when he has more than one thing going on at a time.
If you don't have an organized calendar, you'll be harder to plan your time around important tasks and appointments. On the other hand, if you're disorganized, it will often lead to missing deadlines or forgetting things completely. It's up to you to make sure everything is organized so that you can get the most out of your day.
Stay focused and motivated on the job by making sure your team has the resources they need to do their jobs effectively.
Chris says that if you're disorganized, it will usually lead to trouble in the future. Out of focus leads to out of control and out of control leads to procrastination.
One of his favorite ways to stay focused is by setting up a routine that you follow every day. By doing the same, important things each day, he can help ensure that he gets important tasks done before they're due.
That doesn't mean Chris is an uptight robot with no room for fun in his life – far from it! He just knows how to manage time in a way that works for him, always allowing time for the little things in life like watching Game of Thrones or spending time with friends and family members.
Conclusion
If you're looking for some simple ways to help you manage time better, check out this checklist from our friends at Conquering Chaos:
1. Keep a calendar and schedule important events in advance.
2. Use time blocks to get more done in less time.
3. Plan your day the night before. Wake up 15 minutes early, turn off the alarm, and plan your day ahead of time to get a jump start on the day.
4. Don't take on more than you can handle, and don't take on tasks that aren't going to help you reach your bigger goals.