Time Management Training for Managers

You may have heard a lot, read a lot about time management. We can't really manage time. We can manage what we do with the time that we have, where we focus our efforts, our attention, our energy. So in this module, we're going to look at how you can get the best from managing yourself and then let time look after itself. There is nothing psychobabble or boring theory about this. It's really practical. If it looks so easy that you think, I do that anyway, you may do it. Let's do it a little bit more. Let's do it with a little bit more focus. If you're not doing it and it sounds a bit boring because it's structured, it's not so structured that it's regimented and you are a prisoner of this model. It's there as a guide, bit like wearing a seatbelt in your car. Bear in mind also, you have relationships that really impact the ability and willingness for you to manage your time. Sometimes managing your priorities is about telling a stakeholder, a peer, a team member, or your manager that you can't do something right there and then because your attention is elsewhere. Well, that might lead to disharmony, might lead to disagreement, to conflict. That's dealt with in the Crucial Conversations module. So leave that for now and let's just take a look at this model. So there are a number of slides here. The slides are just there for your reference. And the key thing is you can't manage your priorities if you don't know what your most important goal is. Now, if you're thinking my most important goal to make is to make sure nothing goes wrong, the plates don't spin and smash, all this kind of thing, that's not a goal, that's survival. But this would come from a discussion with your line manager or stakeholder in terms of not just what is the goal. Well, the goal is to deliver as much value as possible, of course, but where, on what matters, on what projects In what activities? Now, this isn't being investigative and just interrogating someone to establish this. It's if you don't understand it, you can't deliver it. And this is why managing upwards is part of effective communication, saying to your manager, just so I'm clear, I understand my most important goal for this week or this next fortnight or this next 4 weeks, this month, to be a Is that correct? And now, of course, the goal may have many mini goals, sub-goals from it. But you say, yeah, your goal for the next 2 weeks is to establish some service level agreements for the customer service team. I don't know, for the sales team, whatever it may be. Or your most important goal is to ensure that the half-yearly appraisals are prepared in good time. So that you and the team members individually can get lots of value from it. So if you're not clear on what your goal is, establish it. And by asking your manager, your leader, you're not showing that you're weak. You're showing that you care because you're actually asking. When my team work with the corporate client, we don't say, what training do you want? We say, what value do you want to get from the training? And they tell us their most important goal. It's really, really simple. So please establish your goal. You may think it's one thing, your manager may think it's something else, a key stakeholder or a peer may think it's something completely different. Remove the ambiguity and get clear on it. Clarity creates understanding, understanding creates meaning, and then you can set off on your journey in where to invest your time. There's a big difference between being proactive and you owning where your attention goes, where your energy goes, and for what period of time, and what value is created, than being reactive and just thinking, I'll deal with whatever comes my way. And it's going to be bedlam this week. 200 emails, 14 meetings, 3 one-to-ones. And no, we're not after that. We're after you taking ownership and indeed enjoying taking ownership as well. So after you've Establish the goal. After the goal's been set, what do you do then? And this is about beginning with the end in mind, not how do I start the journey. You can do that, but the journey may change, of course. Different priorities may show up, obstacles may show up that you haven't anticipated or planned for. But if you think about, if I'd already achieved this goal this week, what steps would I have taken? What opportunities would I have identified and who with? What potential obstacles would have been anticipated? Not just problems being solved. What potential obstacles and problems would I have anticipated before starting to progress with this goal? And if you act as if you'd already achieved the goal in your own mind and write things down on paper and work backwards, it gives you a different perspective in terms of what deserves your attention, what deserves your energy, what can can be delegated, you know, and what conversations perhaps deserve to happen. So we don't, if we're reliant on someone else's input, we don't just say, have you got 5 minutes when they're in the middle of something because that will destroy their priority management. So this is having a plan in place that isn't so rigid that it restrains you. It's being structured So it enables you. Put first things first. The, um, think of it this way. If you're about to fly off on a holiday or a trip and you're sat on the aeroplane and, uh, with 200 other passengers and then you look out the window because you've been lucky enough to get the window seat and then you see two pilots getting onto the aircraft and they're not passengers, they are the pilots that are flying the aircraft. Is something wrong? Shouldn't they be on first? Shouldn't they be on ahead of you and your fellow passengers so they can plan, they can prepare, they can check the weather, they can put the coordinates into the computer system, they can check the aircraft is airworthy and all these things? This is the same principle for you, even though you're not flying an aircraft, perhaps. It's about planning. Preparing, anticipating, um, resolving potential issues, putting plans in place before they even occur. With pilots, they can control, influence many things. They can't stop the Earth from turning, and they can't influence the weather. What they can do is know their destination, and however they get there, even if it's got diversions, they know that they've got a plan in place. Deal with it. This is about you putting first things first. What deserves your attention? Who can be involved that you can delegate to? Who can be involved that can give you a different perspective on what you're doing rather than reinventing the wheel? And it's also planning things into your schedule, not leaving it wide open so people can put calendar meetings and all these things in. It's having this time booked out so you can have deep focus times where deserved. So uninterrupted, no distractions, email switched off, making real progress, structured progress step by step, and making it meaningful so you can actually notice the progress that's taking place in that time. But also it's about keeping track of your ability and willingness to focus because distractions are so easy, interruptions are so easy, especially if you value relationships, you don't want to appear rude. It's not being rude planning time in so you can invest it in yourself and invest it in making progress. The next point is these 5 points here. First of all, notice what your time stealers are. What is a time stealer? Something that distracts us, interrupts us, that has little if any value in terms of moving you towards achieving or progressing towards your most important goal. What I'm not saying is if someone says, 'Hey, have you got a minute?' You say, 'Is it a minute? Because I'm really busy.' We don't want to do that. That's not healthy. What you do is, is it your email pinging? Is it your phone ringing? Is it people expecting things with crazy deadlines that are seemingly imposed rather than agreed and committed to? What are the distractions that you have? Is it people coming to your desk? There is a time, of course, to sit at your desk and progress. There's also time to find an office elsewhere or a bit of quiet space where people know where you are, but they know why you're there, and they know that if they have a question or a challenge, there's someone you've delegated responsibility to, to respond to them. Notice what the time stealers are. Second one, proactive calendar management for yourself and encouraging it in others as well. If you don't know where your organization or your brain, uh, requires you to invest time to progress with matters, things will just show up. It'll be reactive, at the mercy of what's happening around you, rather than taking ownership, personal ownership, and your team members' collective ownership of putting first things first, like the pilots— planning, preparing, progressing. We'll come to calendar management in a few moments' time. Delegating, there's a module on this. Delegating is supporting, encouraging, enabling, equipping, and encouraging someone to either learn something new and progress with it with your oversight and input, or it might not be learning something new. It might be something she or he or they can do easily, and by doing so, it enables you to focus on the higher value activities. And remember, delegating isn't abdicating. Where you just hope people do it and then if it doesn't work, blame. No, there's the module on delegating. Please give it a go. And a buffer in terms of your calendar. If you have a meeting at 9:30 to 10 o'clock and then you've got a 10 o'clocker till 11 o'clock, then you've got an 11 o'clock till 12 o'clock. This is absolutely crazy. You don't get time to think. You don't get time to plan. You don't get time to finish in your brain that 9:30 to 10:00, that's now you're into another meeting. You can't focus. You can't give best value. This is why putting 10 minutes, 15 minutes even, thinking time in your schedule, just to give you a buffer between meetings, between activities. Thinking time can also be, phew, that was a heavy meeting. I'll make my notes and then I'll crack on with the next thing. Back-to-back meetings, it might sound cool, it might sound really, uh, as if you're committed. It's not healthy, it's not effective, even though some people think it's a good thing. A buffer time, time to think. You can only act on what you're thinking about, and this is why thinking time is so important. And the fifth one is switch off email notifications. Easy. Remove yourself from notifications that don't really involve you, even though you're on the distributor list. Switch off your phone. Don't put it on silent and keep it in view, because if someone calls or texts or WhatsApps or whatever it may be, a notification may show up on screen. Put it on silent, take it off vibrate, and then put it out of sight. Why? Because It's just another distraction. If you're expecting to have to respond to something, of course, plan it in, or at least in email correspondence, let people know when you'll be checking your emails. And we'll come on to that in a few moments' time. But switch things off that in the moment might feel really valuable and can't do without it. Yes, you can. It was called the '80s. Then this, Looks simple, doesn't it? There is a website called calendarpedia.co.uk. I will put the link in, uh, below this module. And you can print off daily, weekly, hourly, uh, yearly calendars. Don't go into years yet, but you can, uh, publish— uh, sorry, you can put— you can print off, um, calendars, daily calendars that are in half an hour slots. Why not print a few off for these next coming weeks and just think about where your time is best invested. Things will happen. Unexpected things show up. But if you're proactive and planning and preparing and how you respond to the, even these unexpected, um, items and matters and issues, you're way ahead. You've got your seatbelt on. So this is Monday through Friday. Let's assume it's a 5-day week, Monday to Friday, even though your schedule may be different. And you start at 9, your day at 9 o'clock and you finish at 5 o'clock. Now, this is in 30-minute time slots. You may want to go down to 15, but you think, well, there's a lot to get through there. If we don't plan our time in small chunks, the day can just run away with us. Here's the thing to do. Each and every day, you might want to look at where your attention is going to be invested. What deserves your attention? What value are you expecting to deliver that day and indeed the next day? So this is just a sample. You do your own. This is one that I find really useful. Jane, it's just an example. Please do your own. So Monday 9 to 9:30 is planning. Some people enjoy a power hour, an hour of power where emails are off, phone's off, they're away from the colleagues and they just plan what's going to get their attention, who deserves a catch-up, when's someone going to have their one-to-one, what is most important in terms of making progress on a certain project. You can do that if you wish. I often do 30 minutes, 3 or 4 times a week. So each and every day starts with planning. And each and every day towards the end of the day is reviewing and preparing for the next day. You see, if we start off with a plan and then we have time slots in, for example, uh, 10:30 to 11:00, deep focus. This is where I may be producing a video such as this, a tutorial, a document, a client proposal, um, that kind of thing. Course content. So 10:30 to 11 and 11 to 11:30 on Monday, deep focus, no distractions. Now, if I finish what I'm doing ahead of that, wonderful, I can have some thinking time. If I don't, I've still got 11:30 to 12 o'clock to just grab a cuppa, grab a sandwich, whatever I want to do. But at lunch as well, you know, Monday may take an hour If you're thinking, I can't take an hour, I have too much to do, you perhaps don't have too much to do. It's just the planning and execution of it may not be as refined as it might deserve. 1 to 1:30, email check-in. That's where email is switched on and we respond to inquiries, to client questions, invitations, that kind of thing. 2 to 2:30, a one-to-one with a colleague. It could even be a one-to-one with your manager. 3 to 3:30, key performance indicator reviews or service level agreement reviews, whatever they may be. But notice there are slots in here each day where people can put things in your diary. But with prior notice of what can go in and what shouldn't go in. So the Tuesday, 9 to 9:30, delegation check-in. Someone that's doing an activity, a task, a project, a mini project, checking in with them to see how they're progressing and what support's required from you and what the next step is. I've not filled this out day to day to day to day. It might be overwhelming. But again, lunch, always take a lunch. You know, don't work through lunch. It's thinking time. It's revitalise time, it's refreshing time. Email checking is around the same time each day. And if you want to manage priorities, tell people when you will be checking emails and when they can reasonably expect a response, even if it's just an interim response. So get on Calendapedia and start producing some weekly, um, schedules because you will find that life gets easier. And with this upfront investment in planning and preparing and prioritising and communicating, it makes life easier and you get more done. And if you get more done, you're often doing it in less time. And if you're delegating people, you're helping, you're encouraging, you're educating, and indeed it leads to even more effective teamwork. So what I'd like you to do is think about what is worth you starting doing in terms of how to manage your priorities, your focus, your energy. And your effort? What few things really matter for you to be as effective as possible, as efficient as possible, and indeed engaging as possible with your colleagues in terms of how they manage their priorities, how they manage their focus, and how they make progress? What is it worth stopping doing? Stopping doing might be, I'm going to stop saying yes in the moment to people who ask me if I can achieve a crazy deadline. I'm going to stop just saying, yeah, no problem. To my manager when she or he says, I need this ASAP, without saying, when is ASAP? Because I have these other priorities that you trust me to deliver. And let's just prioritise. And what's it worth continuing to do that you're already doing really well? This is not about reinventing the wheel. It's about refining and optimising. So what's it worth starting doing? What's it worth stopping doing? And what's it worth continuing? For you and your colleagues. Please take 5 or 10 minutes to make some notes on this because it is your seatbelt. It gives you structure, it gives you focus. Life gets easier. And define your outcomes before acting. This whole seatbelt I keep mentioning, and the airline pilots, they know where they're going, they know the end destination. Prioritizing your effort, your energy, your focus, and indeed resources helps you understand what the destination is and how to get there safely and confidently and really effectively too. So that in a nutshell is how to manage priorities and time, if we can manage time, and your focus. It's also linked to healthy emotional intelligence, reality testing, remaining objective, impulse control, not jumping in and getting started straight away when perhaps the business or your organisation and you don't actually deserve that. It's about thoughtful consideration before you set off. So that is how to manage your priorities and your focus. If you have any questions, just pop me a message. I'll be right back to you.