"Time management" with Henrik Spandet

All right, so we're, we're back with another episode of Conversations. Today I have with me Henrik Spandit from, um, well, you have a couple of different activities going on, so I'll let you tell and introduce those yourself. Um, the topic today is time management. So welcome, Henrik. Let us know who you are and what you're up to, please.

Thank you very much for the invite, Peter. Today I am spending most of my time training executives internationally in time management, in efficiency, productivity, so that they can have more time to spend on what really matters. So that's my, my main thing going on at the moment. I've been doing that for 12 years and previously I used to be CEO in a number of companies, mainly but not limited to fashion, lifestyle and luxury.

And so this idea of time management, I mean, literally this morning somebody wrote something on LinkedIn about time management and how to get better at it. It seems to be, it seems to be a theme for the ages, right? Like, preparing for this conversation, I found a quote by Leonardo da Vinci, of all people, who said, uh, time stays long enough for those who use it. So even back at his time, there was issues with the feeling of not having enough time. Why do you think that is? Why do you think we're so obsessed with time?

Well, I think we should actually be more obsessed with time.

Why is that?

I think a lot of people are not obsessed about time. They're not protecting their time just like you would be protecting or spending your money wisely. I think that a lot of people are spending time as if it would be confetti. They are not prioritizing time on what they should spend activities on. So I think actually we are not sufficiently obsessed. I think we are not focusing enough on doing what really matters. And time is limited. It's a finite resource. We all have the same 24 hours a day. And somehow Some people seem to be spending it better than others.

And in there lies a couple of things that are interesting, right? Spending it better than others. So, you know, that's kind of a judgmental statement, right? So I think maybe if I were to unpack that, I would say, are they spending it on what they believe is the best thing they can spend their time on, right? So that's one question. But the other thing that strikes me when we talk about this is we all talk about it. It's one of those things where we're like, oh, I don't have any time, and let me see if I can find time. And but we don't necessarily do anything about it, right? It's one of those things that it's kind of like I can also walk around and say, hey, I really want to run that marathon. But unless I put on my sneakers and actually start doing something about it, it's not going to happen. So how do we go from talking about it to actually doing something about it?

Well, with most complex stuff in life, it's actually very simple. It's about having an ambition to, to start running a marathon or losing weight or whatever it might be, or become a better leader at work. So that's the intention. But in order to also activate that intention, you need to bring that out And you need to create some, often some habits, if it's running or exercising or eating healthy. And then I would say you also need to put that activity into your calendar. If we look at a company, any company, I would say, would have a budget, a sales budget and a, let's say, a marketing budget. Investment budget, and most companies would know, are they on track with the, with the sales activities or the marketing investments? But I don't see a lot of clients actually keeping the same track on time. I'm not talking about clocking in at 8 AM in the morning and clocking out, but I'm talking about really discussing in, in a team or supervising your team in how time should be spent the best possible way. So to answer your, your first question, I think it was, I think that very few people are spending time as they want to. I think a lot of high-ranked directors, managers are spending time on activities they are not really planning. they are working, they are not working, they're working reactively instead of proactively. And I would say 9 out of 10 in a non-academic survey would be somehow living in their inbox. And I do appreciate there are other media than an email today, but let's just call it inbox. And they are being run by somebody else. So most people I meet are not really running their day. They are— the day is running them.

And I think that's something that we can all kind of resonate with, right? We're reacting to inputs from colleagues, clients, family, whatever it is. There's, there's something that's asking for our time and we don't necessarily consciously decide I'm going to spend time on that. So when you and I first met, which is now a number of years ago, And we've had this conversation many times, but it wasn't until recently when we went to lunch and we gave each other some homework.

Yes.

And the homework you gave me was probably the same thing you've been saying for years, but that I didn't understand or listen or do. And the exercise for me was to actually look at my calendar and then start scheduling when I was gonna do certain things. to get a sense of how much time I spent on certain things, and also when I was going to do them. And for years I've been resisting that exercise because I was like, no, I want to have the flexibility. I want to be able to do whatever I want whenever I want kind of thing. And what I realized— and, and, and don't get too cocky yet, right? Because I, I'm not sure I'm convinced still. But what I did realize was By putting aside separate times for a couple of different activities, that changed my days dramatically. And one of those activities was when I do email, right? It's— you cannot Google time management and everybody out there says have time blocks for your email, do it maybe twice a day, and that's it. And so again, I'm used to being on my phone. I do it all the time. But then I was like, well, Let me try this for a couple of weeks. And I did. And all of a sudden, it was kind of this relief. I didn't have this stream of things that I needed to think about because I knew at 9 AM and at 3 PM, I'd be looking at email and that's when I would deal with whomever wanted something from me. So, so to answer my own question, that's a very simple one thing we can do, right?

I would say if I would have to explain to a potential client on how could you get more time, how could you save time, how could you become more productive, I would start with the emails. I mean, everybody, when I started training in the United States, everybody would be running around with their BlackBerrys and going from meeting to meeting.

BlackBerrys, for those watching this, was the precursor to iPhone, right? Was This little black square box with a little keypad on it. And the only thing it could do in the beginning was email. And then it evolved.

But actually, it also, it was actually the most productive phone you could have. But that's another story. But everybody would be busy and everybody would be, I think you call it FOMO today, would have this fear of missing out on something being extremely important. Am I missing out on something? Is my boss? Does my boss want me to do something for him? And you know, you have to read emails all the time. And I still have a lot of clients who they would insist, well, Henrik, you're not realistic. I have to read my emails all the time. I have to be customer oriented, or I have to be focused on what my boss wants, whatever. But but fact is, every time you start looking at an email. And you're not doing something about that email, but just reading it. I would ask you, Peter, okay, why do you read an email apart from fear of missing out? Why do you read it if you don't act on it according to a certain system?

Right now we're getting fairly tactical quite quickly, which is also fine and fun. But if I wanted to go back to one of your other ideas about budgets, budgets for time, right? So if we're trying to be helpful to the people watching this, what is kind of a simple way to start changing your attitude towards how you spend your time? Is there, is there an easy thing you can start doing today that will help you?

Yeah, well, uh, let's, let's take a practical example. Most, uh, I would guess most of the people listening to your podcasts would be somehow involved in sales. And then sales is something which is easy to measure. So usually in most companies, you would have a budget of, let's call it $1 million. You would break that budget into new biz, existing customers. You would budget how many customers do I have to visit before I get a new customer? How many times do I have to do customer loyalty, retention, visits to customers, etc. So that would be a normal procedure in most companies, I hope. But what is lacking and what I see lacking in 99 out of 100 companies is then to ask the salesperson, or it could be you with your business, existing clients and new clients. Okay, if you have to have 62 visits to potential clients, you have to visit your existing clients so much, you have to do acquisition, you have to do all these activities to reach the number 1 million. Would you please show that to me by putting that activity into your calendar for the next 6 months? And that's where people stall. And I think you would also, because, well, why would Henrik want to? I don't want to be controlled that way. I want to have the freedom and so on. But in your case, I would challenge at least 50% of the budgets for being unrealistic in terms of activity, because it is impossible to do all the activity you have planned in your calendar. It's simply too much. So that would be a practical example. So to try to answer your— yeah.

Yeah, no, so I'm just thinking about that because again, so today's Wednesday. So on That was yesterday. I spoke to a client about that, and her challenge is she recognizes that she's trying to do too much. She recognizes that she's scheduling too many things, but she's not scheduling everything, right? So the thing that's happening for her is she's committing to all these activities, and then on top of that comes— and her big issue is Surprise! Communication, right? It's email, it's WhatsApp messages, it's all sorts of other things. And so at one point she tried to schedule in, call this person, call that person, call this person, call that person, right, in her calendar. But then very quickly an entire day essentially could be spent by calling people, and then she wouldn't have time to do her other things. And so then it becomes another question, which is delegating, right? So it's about, is there somebody else who can do these activities? Because otherwise they won't get done. And as the— she's the chief executive of a sizable company, there will always be things for her to do. So then it's about actually distributing out and using other people's time to get the things done that you need to do. And here comes my question. So there's the stuff that we wanna do. Then there's the stuff that we believe the company needs to do? And how do we help each other manage time together? How do we actually do that?

Right?

Because yes, if we're bosses, it's easy, right? We're just easy. We ask people to do certain things. But if we're colleagues, how do we respect, manage each other's time together? Is that even a thing?

Yeah, I think it is. I think, but it starts with yourself. I mean, if you are not in a position, just like your client, to actually have an overview of how you're spending your time in the best possible way, I think you are in a very weak position if your boss would ask you to do 3 urgent projects next week. Because if you don't have the overview, if you don't have a plan for the week or the month, then the boss or the customer, whoever it might be, would be running your day, your time, and you wouldn't be protecting your time and you wouldn't be prioritizing your time, uh, in, in the best possible way.

Hmm.

And, and to be concrete of what I see successful teams doing, uh, having worked with me, I think it starts doing the, the email thing which we talked about Early on, I normally recommend, just like you're doing it, a check-in in the morning and a checkout in the afternoon. So during the check-in, you, you look at your emails which came in overnight. Maybe you work in different time zones. And let's just assume you have 20 new emails. You would look at those emails and you would work according to what I call the 5D principle. So there are only 5 things you could do with an email. So that's either you delete it, you dump it into a reference folder, you delegate it to someone else if you are in a position to do that, you do it now if it takes less than 5 minutes, just get it out of this world, or you put it on your task list. So that's the 5 actions. And then you process emails. You're not reading them. You're not saying, should I do something about this email? Well, maybe later, right? So you do it now, get them out of this world. And then you look at the day and you prioritize, what am I supposed to do today? So that would be the check-in. The check-out is very similar. You look at the day, did it go according to my plan? No, it never does. It doesn't, it doesn't go for me as well. I mean, that's just the way life is. You're hit by reality every day.

And here's the joy from working from home. Keep going. I'm just gonna go answer the door.

Yeah, do that. Do that. So, uh, so the second, the second activity would be, would be the checkout. And, uh, the checkout would be in the afternoon or the evening, whatever you, you find is, is the best way to do it. And that's where you, you sort of get into inbox zero because it's possible to have a clean inbox. Otherwise, you're not able to To really prioritize, then you're living in your inbox. So, and then plan the next day. And that's basically, that's the activity going on for the whole week. Check in and check out, right? And then here it comes. How can you sort of work together? Because then you get to usually Friday, Friday afternoon to what I used to call the weekly planning meeting. But then I did a lot of training in the States and I learned this wonderful word called the tech. Tactical command meeting. So that's, that's— So I normally call it the tactical command meeting because it's not really strategic. It's planning, uh, next week. And that is what I call the most important activity for the whole week. Because if you're not planning next week, uh, the week will run you and you're not running the week. So, and, and, and, and this is what, what you have started doing. Uh, looking at, at, at the week ahead. And this is what your client, uh, you just mentioned should be doing. Spend, let's say, 1 hour, 1.5 hours. Well, I don't have the time to do that, Peter. Okay. Uh, if you don't have the time to do it, then I cannot help you because if you don't set aside time to do planning and prioritization, then I cannot help you. So you need to set aside that time to do your prioritization. And what you do on Friday, you synchronize your activities together with your colleagues, you manage, you align expectations with your boss, your customers. It could be, hey, you have invited me for this meeting on, well, this meeting, you have invited me for this meeting. So what's the agenda? Well, I haven't had the time to prepare an agenda. Sorry, Peter, I'm not participating in this. I need to have a very clear meeting invite aligning the objective. So I have to maybe to read some pre-reads and so on, and that will not be 10 minutes before the meeting. So align expectations and negotiate the time with your team, with your boss, with your customers.

There is a There are some guys that have built a plugin for Gmail that is the cost of this meeting. So essentially what they've done is they've— I mean, it's hugely inaccurate, obviously, because they don't have everybody's salary information. But it's basically asking the question, does this need to be a meeting or could it be an email? And the way that they're doing it is There's 5 people on this invite. This meeting will cost us, I don't know, $900. Uh, should we do the meeting or should we just deal with what we need to deal with on email? And of course, the meeting gets more expensive the longer it is. And it's, it's made a little bit like a gimmick, but I love the idea, right?

You have to have all 6 team members participating in the meeting, or could We live with just the 2 of you or the 3 of you participating in a meeting and then make, let's say, a summary of the meeting afterwards and spend those additional 10 minutes so that the other 3 people are not spending 50 or 60 minutes in a meeting.

Yeah.

But anyway, so this tactical weekly planning meeting, that's where you plan your activities. You plan both back to your client. You plan both your Your meetings. Are the meetings necessary? Do I really have to participate in the meetings? Do I have a proper preparation for the meeting? Does it make sense? All those questions. So that's the meeting you would have in the calendar. And then what I usually also strongly advise is to also allocate some time for time-consuming tasks, not the 10-minute tasks, but then your calendar would be plastered, right? So the time-consuming tasks like prepare content for LinkedIn could be one, right? Let's say it takes you 3 hours a week. Well, then you need to set aside time to do that. Let's say Monday, Wednesday, and Friday for 2 hours. So doing that, having an overview of your meetings and your tasks, time-consuming tasks, and not having a fully plastered calendar because you also have some smaller tasks and you have the unexpected coming up. Then you have the overview whether you are— it's just like a sales budget. Is it possible to do this, right? So you have a good, you have a good overview of what is realistic. And that's where when we talked about this, I think it was 1 month or 1.5 months ago, I also recommend you to put in some time blocks. In your calendar because you also need to have time for, let's say, strategic work. You need to think about stuff. It shouldn't be all tactical and action-based. Maybe you are a leader of a team, you need to set aside time for that. So all that should be in the calendar and that's basically how you budget your time in the calendar. And if that calendar is full, Well, obviously you have to do some reprioritization just like with the budget.

And I, so, so we've talked a lot about sort of using the calendar to figure out what you're doing, right? Because it's a testament to how you've spent your time, at least on the stuff that was in your calendar historically. Then most people also have a to-do list that they kind of in the past. And now we're moving towards, okay, time blocks for certain activities. And time blocks or space, white space for sort of the stuff that comes up, right? So somehow managing that.

And check in and check out as standard recurring activities every day, apart from Friday afternoon where you would have this weekly planning meeting, tactical command meeting. Yes. Yeah.

So one of the other things that I've many years started doing is whenever So today, obviously, I don't have a big team working with me. But when I used to have that, whenever somebody wanted my time, I got the habit of saying, do I need to spend time on this? Not because I was being rejective, but more because, like, the person requesting saying, is it actually necessary for me to spend time on this? Or would you be okay making a decision yourself? For for example, right? So, oh, we need to meet about doing XYZ. I would say, do I need to spend time on this? Or do you already have an idea of what the decision should be? And then the person would say, well, I have a pretty good idea. And I would say, well, I trust you, go do, right? So—

When I was CEO, many years ago, and having a lot of people working for me, I remember I had 14 reports at one time. And you would tell me that's impossible. And I did 140 days traveling at the same time. So I really had to take care of my time management. And I simply introduced this habit when somebody would come to me and say, hey, we have this issue with this customer and we need to talk about it. I would create a habit in the organization that you have to have your own opinion about this before you approach me. So I Usually say, well, what would you do about it if I wouldn't be around? Which would be 140 traveling days a year. Well, I would offer the customer whatever, 5% discount and do this and this. And then I would say, that's fine with me, just go ahead.

And that's the thing, isn't it? I mean, so one of the things we have to remember when we hire people and, you know, we obviously hire them because they're going to be good at what they're going to do. We also hire them because we trust in their judgment. But then sometimes in some organizations, the minute they start working with us, we take that away, right? Because they have this feeling that they have to go ask the boss, or they have to. So I think one thing I'd encourage people watching this to do, if they're still with us, is to, whenever somebody reporting to you asks you a question on something, try it out. Try to do what Henrik just described, or what I've described, which is Let them make the decision. Chances are they're gonna make a pretty good decision. And even if it's an 80% versus what you together could have made 100%, the time saved, the confidence you're showing them, the trust you're showing them is worth more than the 20% sort of subpar performance, right?

And if you do that, let's just say for the argument's sake, if you do that 3 times a day.

Yeah.

And say for the argument, you save 1.5 hours doing that. You may only get 80% of what you really wanted. On the other hand, you get 1.5 hours to do other stuff, which would be hopefully, if you plan well and prioritize well, would be the important and maybe not urgent stuff, but the important stuff.

Right.

You expect it from you as a leader, as a manager, as a director, whatever, of the company, right? So you're not ending up working, burning the midnight oil until 3 o'clock and doing, you know, sending out the shipment and so on. And I was working, I was busy. Well, that's not really the objective. The objective is to have actually so much time that you That you have the overview and the everything is running, but you have some time also to spend on, on, on the less burning platforms, the less urgent stuff, but the important stuff for you yourself. That could be your, that could be exercise, healthy food, whatever, going for a walk, but also the, the more strategic views on, on the company.

Henrik, we are shortly running out of time. So if you were to leave our audience with one idea, one thing that they should take away from this conversation, what is that?

Don't live in your inbox. Get to inbox zero. It's possible. Get a clean desk just like you have a clean inbox. Act on your emails 2 or 3 times a day and spend the rest of the time what you actually hired to do or you hired yourself to do. And that is actually to work on something and not reading emails.

I think that was more than one, but we'll take it. I'd like to finish with a quote by an author named Henry David Thoreau. who said something along the lines of, uh, it is not enough to be busy because so are the ants. The question is, what are we busy about, right?

Yes.

So having awareness of what am I actually spending my time on is the first step to actually understanding how to change your relationship with time and spend it on the things that matters most.

Peter, I'm gonna steal that.

All right, my friend, thank you so much. It was a pleasure seeing you here. And to the people watching, we will be doing more of these. If you have suggestions or ideas to somebody that I should speak with, please leave it in the comments where you do that on where you're seeing this, or just get in touch. I'm easy to find. Thank you, Henrik.

Thank you, Peter. Pleasure.