Cameron Herold argues that priority management, not time management, is what actually works. He uses Parkinson's Law—work expands to fill the time you give it—and a simple A/B ranking system to focus on high-leverage tasks. His example: a leader with 84 hours of weekly work delegates 80%, keeps 16 hours for top priorities, and spends the rest coaching the team.
Chapters
If I think about time management, project management, delegation, coaching, situational leadership, they're all very tightly woven together. When you're coaching someone and delegating work to them and helping them manage their projects in time and leveraging situational leadership, you can get more done with less people faster. At the end of the day, we all have our to do list. Our to do list does not have our name on it. Well, our job is to get that stuff off our list and into the plates or onto the plates of other people. Our job is to delegate and to grow them. The reality is, if you look at your to do list, you have too many things on that list to fit into your calendar for the week anyway. Time management starts with priority management. It starts with discussing and deciding what are the priorities to focus on first? How do we really, really focus on those priorities and then how do we make everything else secondary? Elon Musk said something a few weeks ago and he said if a leader in a company is not very, very clear on what the number one biggest priority is in, they're the problem. So time management starts with understanding priorities, figuring out of all the stuff that needs to get done, what are the A's and the B's, of all the A's, which one's a one, which one's a two, which one's a three. This is why it's important to go through the content multiple times. As it reinforces it, it refreshes it, it shows you like, oh God, I went through this once, I learned it and I've done nothing, or I've been, I've been bumping my head. This week more than ever. Now the content makes more sense. Maybe you went through the content a year ago, now you're seeing it a second time. But what you're struggling with now, some of that content now answers. That's why I like to go through it two or three times. So priority management is where time management starts. The second biggest thing I've always done with time management is thinking about Parkinson's Law. Parkinson's Law says that work expands to fill the space that we give it. So unless you put a time constraint around things, everything becomes an all day job. So when we're in business, we have to be able to manage our time and manage our projects in a similar way. Those would be my two big overriding rules around time management is it's around priorities and it's around Parkinson's Law. If you haven't already come, check out the Second Command podcast on YouTube. It's at YouTube. SecondCommandpodcast if I think about time management, project management, delegation, coaching, situational leadership, they're all very tightly woven together. When you're coaching someone, delegating work to them and helping them manage their projects in time and leveraging situational leadership, you can get more done with less people faster, you can get stuff off your plate faster. Priority management means for you to work on the stuff that is the highest leverage, which should be growing people, which means it's not doing work. So if you're not doing the work, you have to delegate the work, coach people on doing the work, train people to do the work, help them manage their time in their project so they can do the work. So I had a client that I was coaching years ago. She would make a list of all of the projects that she had to do over the course of the week. So she might have 40 different projects. Then she would prioritize them into A's and B's. Then she would put the numbers of one through whatever for each of the A's and B's. Then she would think about how many hours each project was going to take her in 30 minute increments. So every project was at least 30 minutes to start it, plan it, outsource it, whatever. So at the end of Sunday night she might look at her list and go, Well, I have 84 hours of things to do this week. I don't want to work an 84 hour week. So she would delegate 80% of the hours to other people before she would allow herself to work on a single project. If you have 84 hours, 80% of that is like 68 hours. She would look to get rid of 68 of those hours, leaving her with 16 hours of work that she would block into her calendar. A1 for this time block, A2, B, whatever. And then she would spend the rest of her week coaching people, growing people, cheering people on. That's the importance of time management. It's why we have to get people inside of our company that are managing others good at this stuff. And it's why we have to become the student has to become the teacher is you have to start teaching priority management and time management to your direct reports.
