# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
If something is important to you, it will be important to the stakeholders you serve, and nothing says more about your priorities and values than how you spend your time.

# data[].attributes.headline
How Principals Actually Spend Their Time

# data[].attributes.subject
How Principals Actually Spend Their Time

# data[].attributes.headline
How You Spend Your Time Doesn't Matter if You're Not Paying Attention

# data[].attributes.subject
How You Spend Your Time Doesn't Matter if You're Not Paying Attention

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
If there is any one 'secret' to effectiveness, it is concentration.
-Peter F. Drucker, management philosopher

"At the end of the day, my brain feels like scrambled eggs!" admitted Phil, an attorney at whose firm I teach. He, like many, was living out the effects of what it means to not prioritize attention in the workday. When distractions abound how do you find focus to get something done?

Make Attention a Priority

My previous post explored what attention is and why it's important to both quality of life and fundamental effectiveness. Attention is the basic resource or energy you have to invest in your experience. You are what you attend to. It's that simple.

Let's go "Big Picture" for a moment. Managing attention has not been on our radar screens because until recently most of us took it for granted. Education has largely emphasized skills for thinking and underemphasized, or ignored altogether, the skills of attending, seeing, and perceiving (let alone feeling). Look at what gets cut from school budgets when times are tough: Arts, sports, and music are the domains that cultivate perception, focus, and their relationship to performance. For good or for ill, we are an "I think therefore I am" culture. Given that, it's easy to see how even the so-called "well-educated" can overlook attention.

A New Way to Think about What "Well-Educated" Means

Management philosopher Peter F. Drucker understood that going forward truly educated (and effective) people "will need trained perception fully as much as analysis." In a quickly-changing world, effective people will need to clearly see as much as clearly think. The starting point of this is managing attention and focus. So many stimuli compete for attention, any hope for effectiveness rests on being more conscious of how you use it alone and together with others.

This series of posts intends to create the talking points for you to have a conversation with those you work and live with to make a priority around attention. The more you do that, the better able you will be to stay true to your goals, perform toward your best, and engage the world in a meaningful way.

So many stimuli compete for attention, any hope for effectiveness rests on being more conscious of how you use it alone and together with others.

1. Manage Attention Not Time

People tend to think managing time forms the foundation for able action. Even Drucker thought, " Time is an executive's scarcest and most precious resource." However, I believe this is a misperception. Who actually can manage time? Can you make the future come faster or return to the past? Unless you're a sci-fi hero, no. What people actually do in the flow of time is manage attention.

For example, Phil may block off several hours to work on a case, but if he spends those hours obsessing over baseball stats, we say he mismanaged his time. In reality, his attention wasn't where it needed to be. No one manages time. We manage our attention.

This point may seem like nitpicking, but I believe it is vital because it gives you a lever you can actually pull. What follows are real-life strategies developed by my students and clients that have worked for them.

2. Name Your Priorities

This sounds simple, but I've observed that we don't name them frequently enough. All too often, we allow the momentum of whatever we've been doing to make our decisions for us. Habits are great as long as they're serving our true intentions or a situation's real needs. Otherwise, we wake up and go through the motions while missing the important things.

So, the first and most essential step is knowing what your intentions are. Ask yourself: "What's vital for me to put energy on right now"?" or "Is this the best use of my energy?" These questions can help clarify what's essential. Intentions also help to say "no" to the less important (but perhaps more urgent). Clarifying intentions brings greater direction to investing energy.

Habits are great as long as they're serving our true intentions or a situation's real needs. Otherwise, we wake up and go through the motions while missing the important things.

Ask yourself these questions to clarify your priorities:

1. What are you doing to prioritize your day and develop an action plan when you are inevitably interrupted?

2. What is okay to say "no" to?

3. How will you handle interruptions when they arise?

4. Do you hold an assumption that you must respond to any interruption?

5. Are you afraid you will be disliked/unloved/fired if you fail to respond immediately to an email?

I've consistently found that people have far more latitude in saying no or "later" to incoming requests than they realize.

Priorities apply both to the short- and long-term. In the moment, it means choosing where attention should focus right now. Finish this memo due tomorrow or look-up that Yoda quote you can't quite recall?

In the long run, where we put our attention is central to a sense of meaning and purpose. Is Phil's diversion into baseball stats and not writing law briefs a sign that maybe he's bored with being a lawyer? Is there something else he'd rather be doing?

In the long run, where we put our attention is central to a sense of meaning and purpose.

3. Conduct an Attention Audit to Improve Focus

Knowing where attention should go isn't going to help if you can't stay there. Distractions destroy focused attention. While I'm not convinced it's possible to entirely remove them, it is possible to make great strides in creating an environment that promotes and protects attention.

Look at your environment and what is there to support focus or hinder it. Evelyn, a frustrated marketing executive, looked at her workspace through the lens of attention. She immediately noticed that the office copy machine was placed outside her door. The dots connected. She was frustrated because while waiting for their copies, her well-intentioned colleagues would stick their head in her door and chat. This happened several times an hour and she could rarely find focused flow. Eureka! A phone call to facilities to move the machine and she finally enjoyed a day of satisfying concentration.

Look around, what can you do right now? Do you work in an open office environment? What signals can you send that say, "Don't bother me?"

These steps are only the beginning. Each of these strategies can be built out and expanded upon. The next post will dive into deeper detail.

Remember, be patient with yourself as you start this process. These essential skills take time to cultivate and explore to find the strategies that help each of us stay effective in turbulent times.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Manage Your Attention, Not Your Time - Mindful

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
With so many stimuli competing for attention, any hope for making it through the day without our brains feeling like scrambled eggs rests on being more conscious of how you parse attention over specific tasks. Here are three ways to keep your focus flowing.

# data[].attributes.headline
Time Spent Thinking *IS* Legitimate Critical Work for Leaders

# data[].attributes.subject
Time Spent Thinking *IS* Legitimate Critical Work for Leaders

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Executive Summary

One of the biggest challenges leaders face is protecting their time and attention from other people's problems. While it's a commendable instinct to want to be available to your team at all times, it's not practical - and it doesn't help them learn to solve problems on their own. To protect your own time, and help your team become more independent, try four tactics: first, mentor them in hindsight, asking them to solve problems first and then workshop them with you afterwards. Second, create clear guidelines that let them know what decisions they can make without consulting you. Third, have regular check-ins with your direct reports so that you can "batch solve" problems. And fourth, be available less often. If you disconnect from time to time, it will force your team to rise to the occasion.

Hayon Thapaliya/HBR Staff

We know that controlling what we pay attention to is the key to living an intentional life. According to an informal poll of my clients, one of the biggest impediments to attention management is "O.P.P." - other people's problems. This is a particular problem for my clients in leadership who find it difficult to disconnect from their team, even for short periods. The primary reasons they give for this constant availability are that they "don't want to be the bottleneck that holds up important work," and they want to be available to make decisions and mentor their staff through problems.

So in this article, I want to take a deeper dive into learning to control your environment. When leaders' time is constantly in demand from staff, they report they have too little time remaining to engage in what might be their most important role - " reflective thinking time." This is time to look ahead, consider different paths, play out different scenarios, and generally be visionaries for the organization. And even worse, the constant distraction undermines their very capacity for being reflective, by eroding their attention span and crowding out "slow thinking" with "fast thinking."

How can leaders create the time and space to think and get important work done, while still being mentors and enabling the team to keep their work moving forward? I arm my clients with four strategies that help them find this balance.

Mentor in hindsight. Mentoring is an important role of leadership and helps to groom employees to advance within the organization. However, they learn much less when advice is given on the front end than they do when they have the opportunity to experience their own successes and failures and discuss them with their boss later.

Try opening scheduled discussions with staff by saying, "What problems or challenges did you face this week, and how did you deal with them? ... And how well did that work out for you?"

If you're concerned about how team members can identify what kinds of issues they can solve on their own and what they should bring to you, consider the next strategy.

Create boundaries for decision-making. Sometimes, it's hard for employees to determine what they should handle on their own and what is outside the scope of their responsibilities. This problem is alleviated when all employees know exactly what their ultimate role in the company is and when it's acceptable for them to make mistakes within that role.

An added benefit of this clarity is creative thinking in unusual circumstances that can't be predicted. For example, Zappos customer service staff know that their ultimate role is to create a WOW experience for their customers, and when they make decisions based on that motivation, they'll be praised and not scolded. An example of this is the legendary customer service of Zappos that results in things like flower delivery and pizza research, but also generates free press, loyal customers, and organizational success.

Have regular meetings with direct reports and designated times for others. Your team will want time with you, and you should be available to them, for mentoring and other reasons. This is where the philosophy of an "open door policy" originated. The mistake frequently made is that this is often interpreted as "open all the time." The original intent is to have times when you are accessible to your staff, but not necessarily any time, all the time.

Instead, reliably dedicate time on your calendar every week for each of your direct reports. If they feel empowered to make decisions on their own, and they understand how far their responsibilities extend and what they need your help for, they will then be more likely to hold their questions and issues to discuss at your weekly meeting. This not only empowers them, it also results in you being interrupted less often.

If you're in senior leadership, and your organization isn't too large to logically prohibit this, you should also dedicate time to interact with those who have one or more layers of managers in between you and them. This could be done using "office hours," where you designate some time periodically when you are available for "drop-ins." It's good for morale and engagement when employees feel like they have (reasonable) access to "their boss's boss." Or if you want more control over their access to you, another way to do this is via " management by walking around."

Be available less often. Think of those times when you've been working but away from your email for extended periods, like while you are attending an off-site meeting or conference. And when you get back to it, you've likely had a series of emails from one or more members of your team in a progression similar to this:

(Oldest message) "Hey boss, I know you're out of the office today but we're having this issue we'd like to discuss with you..."

(Next message) "I guess you're still tied up but if you can squeeze in a minute to call the office..."

(Last message) "Never mind, we figured it out..."

The lesson here is that if the boss is unavailable more often, the team figures things out on their own more often. This allows them to grow in their positions, and it minimizes the interruptions the leaders face.

This situation illuminates other problems (besides distraction) that arise when leaders are "too available" to the team. For example, when staff is constantly bringing questions and problems to the boss, and the boss provides answers and solutions, this can create the unintentional consequence of the team becoming disempowered (or lazy). It reinforces the behavior loop of "questions/problems arise; I bring them to my boss; my boss provides answers/solutions." This can suggest to the team, "These problems are beyond the scope of your responsibilities, and so you are correct in bringing them to me," even when this really isn't the case.

If, instead, the boss rebuffs the interruption with some variation of, "I trust your judgment," then the team will feel empowered and will grow in their positions - and ultimately interrupt the boss less.

Now, at this point when I'm delivering a leadership session, someone in the audience invariably interjects, "I think you're right; that's why I tell my team, " don't come to me with problems, come to me with solutions! " My response is that if your staff has identified a problem and has the solution, why do they need to come to you at all? Let them deal with the issue on their own, and then "mentor in hindsight."

For leaders to effectively manage attention, you need to be able to balance interruptions with availability to your team. Employing these four strategies is a step on the path to the ultimate goal of attention management: the opportunity to achieve more of the results that are significant to you, and also have undistracted thinking time, so that you can be the visionary thinker that your leadership position demands.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
4 Ways Leaders Can Protect Their Time and Empower Their Teams

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Executive Summary One of the biggest challenges leaders face is protecting their time and attention from other people's problems. While it's a commendable instinct to want to be available to your team at all times, it's not practical - and it doesn't help them learn to solve problems on their own.

# data[].attributes.body
Not all apply to eduleaders. But many do.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
26 Time Management Hacks I Wish I'd Known at 20

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
21. Yesterday's home runs don't win today's games." - Babe Ruth, Hall of Fame Baseball player Turn the page on yesterday. Only ever think about today and tomor...

# data[].attributes.headline
Conventional Time Management Doesn't Work: Four Key Ways to Approach Leading Your Time

# data[].attributes.subject
Conventional Time Management Doesn't Work: Four Key Ways to Approach Leading Your Time

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Many leaders feel starved for time. Working under the assumption that longer hours lead to improved productivity, they drive themselves and others to increase effectiveness-then try to "squeeze in" good, quality time with loved ones. Working people are expected to run at a fast pace and be highly productive; yet at the same time, there is a chronic sense of individual and collective slippage, less than optimal work performance, and impending burnout.

The ability of leaders to manage the increase in both workload and burnout more effectively is essential because their behavior has significant impact on others. Recent studies confirm that under stress, people act more defensively, make poorer decisions, and literally lose the "executive" function of their minds. This is especially costly for leaders because they set the tone for their organizations. Their moods affect how others think and behave, so that people around them also tend to react in confused, defensive, and otherwise unproductive ways.

When we ask our clients what they know about how to manage time, they list many familiar approaches: set goals, plan ahead, delegate, track commitments to ensure work is completed, and create manageable "to do" lists. When we ask if they use these tools, we get one of two answers:

1. We do all these things, and they are not sufficient for us to stay on top of the demands we face, or

2. We know we should do these things, but we don't have time to do them.

Conventional approaches to time management are useful in organizing to get work done. However, increasing personal efficiency alone is inadequate for helping leaders resolve this key strategic issue: how to achieve high levels of sustainable, long-term performance while meeting the challenge of doing more with less. Powerful workplace dynamics lead people, individually and collectively, to spend large amounts of their work time pursuing non-productive activities. Leaders must understand the nature of these dynamics and what they can do to change individual and collective habits of action.

The purpose of this article is to help leaders at all levels update their approach to time management to better address the challenges of today's work world. The key elements of this new approach are:

1. A focus on sustainable productivity

2. Identification and reduction of "phantom workload"-the work people unwittingly create for themselves by taking short cuts around or trying to avoid essential, difficult tasks

3. Tools for managing time more effectively in four leadership domains

4. A behavioral change model that enables people to reliably put good time management ideas-both traditional and innovative-into sustainable practice.

Increasing Sustainable Productivity

Perhaps the most important assumption for leaders to question is that working harder-longer hours and more days in a year-increases productivity. It's a seductive proposition, because working harder works up to a point-and beyond that point the personal consequences include reduced brain functioning, increased stress and health problems, decreased effectiveness, and strained or failed relationships. The impact on teams and units is also great: Overwork tends to lead to mistakes that result in poor quality and rework; misunderstandings and unnecessary conflict; lack of innovation; and extensive, unproductive meetings. The impact of overwork is sometimes clear and sometimes subtle-but it is insidious, leading to a long-term decline in quality of life.

Bill, a senior manager at a major pharmaceutical company, worked long hours to keep up with his assignments, which included leading several global teams developing market research projects. He enjoyed being the expert who was needed by people across the globe and tried to make himself available to his colleagues. He prided himself on putting in long hours at work and being available at home. But when Marilyn met him, he was in the middle of a brutal divorce and under scrutiny by his boss. He felt pulled in many directions and had trouble focusing on the essence of his responsibilities. He also had difficulty showing the leadership his department needed and was known as an uneven and unreliable manager. Some days he would be remote and unavailable; on others he would be chatty and even long-winded. Because he was so stretched, he let his subordinates run for a long time without supervision. Then, when he caught up on his sleep or reduced his backlog, he would take a look at what had happened without him. Surprised or even shocked by what he saw, he would plunge in with a fine-tooth comb-aggravating his subordinates and creating resentment that he hadn't been more present earlier. Sensing the resentment, he would back off, and the uneven management cycle would repeat.

The costs of his uneven behavior were high, but he had difficulty saying no to requests for his expert advice. If he was going to survive at the company, he would have to deeply restore his energy, learn to set clear priorities, and even out his managerial behavior.

Leaders need to think in terms of increasing not simply levels of work and productivity, but primarily the level of sustainable productivity. By sustainable productivity we mean:

Getting the right things done, well, in a timely way, and

Preserving and restoring resources including oneself, one's good standings with colleagues and customers, and one's relationships with family, community, and the natural environment

Experience shows that time is not something that can be saved; it can only be spent more or less wisely. One way to approach this is to clarify what really matters to us, live life in accordance with our deepest values, and serve others' best interests as well as our own. From a leader's point of view, time management needs to be about helping oneself and others make wise and often courageous choices rather than doing more with less.

Reducing Phantom Workload

One of the best ways to increase sustainable productivity is to reduce what we call "phantom workload." Phantom workload is the unintentional work created when people either take expedient but ineffective short cuts or avoid taking on such essential, difficult tasks as:

Clarifying mission, vision, and values

Asking questions that challenge what is ambiguous or unrealistic

Identifying and resolving conflicts

Clarifying and streamlining decisionmaking processes

Providing candid, constructive feedback

Differentiating people with sanctions and rewards

Launching innovative projects

Making decisions that require disinvestment in programs or projects

The consequences of phantom workload include rework, upset customers, chronic organizational conflict, lengthy unproductive meetings, time wasted solving the same problem over and over again, and extensive signoffs. Phantom workload looks and feels real and unavoidable, yet it can add hours to daily workload without significant benefit. Leaders unwittingly create a vicious cycle where the workload produced by solving these additional problems leads to increased pressure, which in turn leads to greater stress and a further reluctance or inability to engage in difficult tasks (see "Phantom Workload").

In one case, the sponsor of a new project in a major oil company decided not to attend the project's two-hour kickoff meeting. He had other tasks to attend to, and he wanted to empower his project manager to take charge from the very beginning. However, the meeting did not go well because the project team members from different parts of the company could not agree on the project's goals, decision-making processes, and accountabilities. The sponsor subsequently spent 120 hours working with different departments and individuals to resolve the ambiguities and conflicts-60 times longer than the original meeting!

PHANTOM WORKLOAD

In another example, the clinical informatics group of a major healthcare company found itself caught in a dynamic of over-promising and under-delivering to its internal customers. The group's management recognized that it had two ways of dealing with this performance pressure: set realistic expectations with customers or make commitments it was not sure the group could deliver on. Setting realistic expectations was difficult because customers themselves experienced intense pressure to improve short-term business results, the company was highly decentralized, and the innovative work the group did was difficult to scope. By contrast, promising a lot was easier, created customer excitement, and gave group members inspiring goals. Moreover, every once in a while, with a huge push, the group did in fact "pull a rabbit out of the hat."

Avoiding the difficult task of setting realistic expectations, which required ruthless portfolio as well as project planning, resulted in unintended consequences that increased performance pressure even further.

First, the group was under continuous stress to meet generally unrealistic expectations. Since they often hurried to complete projects, they created numerous bugs in their product releases that had to be fixed. This led to even less time for planning and making accurate time estimates. They also had to negotiate customer pressures as delays mounted. When customer frustration increased, the group's credibility decreased, further undermining its ability to recalibrate its customers' unrealistic expectations. Moreover fatigue and discouragement increased along with stress, decreasing the group's creativity and overall work effectiveness even further (see "OverPromising and Under-Delivering").

OVER-PROMISING AND UNDER-DELIVERING

The important tasks that leaders avoid tend to be difficult, unpleasant, or anxiety-provoking. Therefore, addressing phantom workload as a way to manage time calls upon people to confront what is difficult. It requires leaders to go beyond doing current tasks differently to address what they are not doing. Whether they call the tendency "avoidance,", "procrastination," or simply "not getting around to it," leaders need to take a hard look at the tasks they leave unattended before deciding that the benefits of not doing them exceed the costs. Thus, "time management" becomes leadership development. As we face the tasks we typically avoid, we strengthen ourselves to make hard decisions, face difficult people and situations with more grace, and stop ducking what needs to be addressed.

Managing Time in Four Domains

It is helpful to think of time management in four domains. These domains represent the spiritual, mental, emotional, and physical realms, which correspond to four key functions of leadership: mobilizing commitment, thinking strategically, building relationships and community, and organizing for action. The table "Managing Time in Four Domains" describes these functions and their related time management tasks.

Effective leaders must deliver in all four areas, personally or indirectly through people they support. We often generate phantom workload in the areas in which we are weakest, since these are where we tend to avoid the tasks that need to be done. Developing or even getting support for weaknesses does not always come naturally to people who achieve on the basis of one or two strengths. For example, Jack Welch was promoted to CEO at GE because of his extraordinary ability to get things done. Even during his early tenure his reputation to clear out unproductive work and entire businesses earned him the nickname "Neutron Jack." However, over time Welch came to realize that leading GE required him to focus as much on values as results. He cited that a turning point in transforming the company occurred when he made the controversial decision to fire managers who were getting results but failing to practice the organization's new values.

MANAGING TIME IN FOUR DOMAINS
Mobilizing Commitment
According to researchers Heike Bruch and Sumantra Ghoshal, highperforming managers demonstrate high degrees of both focus and energy. Their resulting strong sense of purpose enables them to apply their limited time to greatest advantage (in "Beware the Busy Manager," Harvard Business Review, February 2002). They draw on their purposefulness to sort through the multiple demands on their time and target a few key contributions they want to make.

By contrast, people who don't have enough time to get things done often find themselves in a reactive mode. Disconnected from their sense of purpose and values, they are more easily driven by what others want from them than by their own innate sense of direction. In a world where there is always too much to do, their lack of clear personal purpose leaves them vulnerable to trying to do it all. As a result, they are often unfocused and confused.

Bruch and Ghoshal's research provides support for managers who long to live life directed by an inner compass rather than holding their finger to the wind. Knowing what one deeply cares about is different from knowing what one likes to do; indeed, being true to one's purpose often provides the motivation to take essential but difficult actions. Engaging our sense of purpose is a practice, not a one-time event. We may have to keep asking the questions, "What do I really care about? What do I stand for? What matters most to me?"

Having done the hard and rewarding work of tapping into their own sense of purpose, effective leaders both intuit and shape a shared purpose that unites their organizations. As leaders guide people in their organizations to articulate shared values, mission, and vision, they "save" time later by clarifying the guiding ideas that underpin decision-making throughout the organization.

Knowing your purpose and the goals of your organization enables you to identify the unique contributions you can make. These contributions leverage your passion and talents in the few places where you can have the greatest impact given the needs and direction of the organization. It becomes your navigational system, helping you respond to the excessive demands, tantalizing opportunities, inevitable crises, and frequent interruptions that can so easily distract you from your path.
Thinking Strategically
Clarifying the unique contribution you want to make enables you to set a limited number of goals. Purposeful managers tend to work toward one to three goals at a time and discipline their direct reports to do the same. Limiting goals can seem risky for leaders concerned about missing opportunities or pursuing the wrong direction. However, proliferating goals often substitute for sound strategic thinking, conflict resolution, and tough decision-making. The resulting ambiguity, confusion, and chronic conflicts are costly. Overwork, resentment, mistrust, and burnout are among the highest costs.

Leaders who know the few goals they want to pursue are better prepared to manage tough tradeoffs, for example between:

Short-term vs. long-term

Urgent vs. important

Easy vs. difficult

Comfortable vs. unpleasant

These tradeoffs are tough because we often prefer the left-hand column. Ironically, many managers report that they never have time to do what they believe they should focus on-whether planning, supporting others, or evaluating performance. From this vantage point, sticking with priorities often becomes an act of courage and pattern breaking, even character building. Stephen Covey's time management book, First Things First, makes much of addressing the long-term important versus the short-term urgent. To develop the skills to address the righthand column, we ask slightly different questions as we decide where to focus:

What am I avoiding?

What feels most urgent and compelling, yet might not actually be so very important?

What essential tasks have I "not gotten around to" for the past several days, or weeks, or months?

Who am I blaming for their part in not getting something important done? What is my role in that?

Raising awareness of the righthand column can lead to additional questions that help people focus on what they have been avoiding that is truly important:

1. What specifically are you avoiding? Why?

2. What are the consequences of avoiding this? How important is it really?

3. What is your goal for addressing it?

4. What is the first step you intend to take? By when?

5. What is the second step you intend to take? By when?

6. Who will you ask for support?

Since accurate time estimates can be pivotal in not only the success of a project but also the satisfaction of those involved, making them is an essential part of setting priorities and planning. To do so, we build on prior experience; learn how to include such hidden factors as collaboration time, transition time, and dealing with unforeseen obstacles; and create a buffer for "surprises." These guidelines can help:

Surface and challenge internal and external pressures to underestimate how long things will take.

Include time for preparation, collaboration, transition, and completion in your estimates.

Allow for unforeseen circumstances-set personal deadlines well in advance of actual ones to ensure sufficient buffer time.

Use backcasting as a planning tool.

Often people say that it is not culturally acceptable to tell the truth about how long a project takes. However, identifying the costs of underestimating time can bolster the courage to develop better estimates up front. One manager said, "In our company we never have time to do it right, but we always have time to do it over." That is the essence of phantom workload, and good time estimates can reduce it substantially.
Building Relationships
Trust and respect are the coin of the realm in today's increasingly networked organizations. Establishing clear priorities, managing difficult tradeoffs, and effectively predicting how long things take all help build trust. The ability to make reliable commitments reduces the domino effect produced by missed deadlines, where one person's failure to deliver on time undermines others' abilities to do the same. It also eliminates the need for people to take time away from their own commitments to help complete someone else's work, which is a time-waster and relationship-killer all in one.

No matter how important reliability is, in some organizations it is hard for people to keep their word. Requests to do additional work come frequently and in many forms: as demands, interruptions, crises, and opportunities.

Being true to yourself and your word requires the willingness and courage to resist saying "Yes" when a request takes you away from your chosen goals, or you are not sure you can deliver. Saying "No" is not perceived as an option in many organizations. Moreover, to please others, people often accept ambiguous or unrealistic requests. Clarifying the nature of the request can be construed as not being cooperative or a team player. For example, several members of the clinical informatics group believed:

, "I am not allowed to push back. We know programmers don't code six hours per day, but that's what we budget for."

, "Client expectations are totally out of our control."

Furthermore, in organizations that value busyness over effectiveness, challenging others to keep their word can be equally unpopular. How do we hold people accountable for being late on a project or to a meeting when we know how stretched we all are?

Despite the temptations to say "Yes" to requests, it helps to buy time first to consider the following:

1. Is meeting the request congruent with your personal intentions, skills, and resources?

2. If the requested work does not directly support your goals, does it build sufficient social capital that enables you to be successful in the ways you choose?

3. Is this a SMART request? (This framework is based on the work of Fernando Flores.)

S Specific: the details are clear

M Measurable: one understands the requester's standards

A Attainable: the request is achievable

R Realistic: one can meet the request

T Time-limited: there are clear dates for completion and mid-course correction

The following questions further support the hard work of making effective agreements:

When and with whom do you feel that you cannot take the time to clarify the nature of the request?

When and with whom do you overcommit (clients, colleagues, bosses)?

What beliefs and thinking patterns lead you to take on ambiguous work that you are not sure you can deliver on?

Finally, it is important to note that there are options between responding to a request with an unqualified "Yes" or "No." Sometimes, the most responsible answer-one that best honors the other person's needs as well as your capacity-might be to:

Ask for clarification; ensure you receive a SMART request.

Offer to check your resources and get back to the requester in a specified amount of time.

Make a counter-offer that you believe can still meet the requester's needs.

Clarify the tradeoffs you see and jointly problem-solve an alternative.

The flip side of making reliable commitments is ensuring that others keep their agreements with you. Managers often avoid delegating because they feel that they can do the work better or faster themselves. This might be true, but it means that the manager is not creating conditions for others to be successful. Moreover, if the job being delegated is repetitive, the benefits gained over time by not doing it oneself should outweigh the upfront work involved in coaching someone else to do it.

The following guidelines can help you make others' word good:

Remember that getting others' support requires clear and regular twoway communication-both at the outset and over the course of the commitment.

Ensure that your own requests are SMART ones.

Give people the opportunity to question or modify the request.

Take time to monitor progress, provide support when asked, and encourage learning from failures as well as successes along the way.

Meetings also consume an enormous amount of time. As organizations become flatter and more networked, many meetings across units seem to be required in addition to the more traditional internal ones. Between endless meetings and e-mails, many are concerned that they have precious little time for productive work.

Improving the productivity of meetings, including evaluating the need to have them at all, is an important part of time management. At the same time, we think the proliferation of meetings in today's organizations requires a second and more comprehensive response as well. There is so much flux in organizations that in some cases meetings have become a substitute for organizational structure and organizational norms. An organization-wide task force can be charged with assessing the way the organization uses meetings overall, gauging their effectiveness, training line and network leaders to better use this essential resource, and simultaneously determining what meetings can be eliminated entirely or replaced with alternative forms of communication. One partial solution, used by some companies to reduce meeting gridlock in today's networked structures, is to segment types of meetings and schedule all meetings of a similar type on the same days or weeks.

Finally, as we look at how relationships affect people's ability to manage time, we want to call attention to that most essential relationship-the one we each have with ourself. Our experience of vitality is our key "time management" resource. When we feel awake and alive, we can meet our work with strength and energy. When we are dragging ourselves around, our best hope is to get through the day. One colleague says, "When I am well rested and in good shape, I can do in four hours what otherwise takes me eight."

It is easy to neglect self-care in the name of productivity, but working harder and longer is not more productive beyond a certain point. Taking care of ourselves is essential for sustaining joy and commitment to work. Claiming the value of self-care challenges our mental models. For example, one leader who participates in the daytime yoga class offered at his bank tells his colleague, "I'm off to increase my productivity." Other companies force their employees to take vacation by limiting e-mail access during certain periods of the year.

Jim Loehr and Tony Schwartz, who have worked extensively with both senior managers and professional athletes, conclude that energy not time is an individual's most precious resource (The Power of Full Engagement, Free Press, 2003). They recommend ways to mobilize energy in four areas-spiritual, mental, emotional, and physical-which correspond to the four leadership domains described here. Developing periods of self-renewal during the day, like five-minute stretch breaks, can extend and increase energy. For many, the most important source of renewal is their family. Unfortunately, the demands of work often show up at home, where people feel more comfortable expressing the negative energy that builds up during the day. Approaching family and friendship as an afterthought or even a dumping ground threatens the very support that many people need to maintain sustainable productivity at work.

Refreshing ourselves at all levels is key to sustaining interest in work and life. Self-care breaks throughout the day, week, and year are essential to making the most of the time we have.
Organizing for Action
Taking action inevitably leads to natural disorder: papers and books are placed on surfaces, e-folders and files are opened, notes are written down, etc. The critical point in keeping track of information and "stuff" is what we do after we create the disorder. Do we put things away in places where we can easily retrieve them, or do we allow the temporary chaos to expand indefinitely? Do we clean up our creative messes or create toxic ones? Honestly answering these questions can be especially difficult for leaders who see the big picture and don't want be bothered with details.

It can be helpful to remember that effective leadership involves implementation as well as ideas, and that implementation is in the details. People can accomplish great things without taking care of some of the basics, but there may come a time when addressing fundamental organizing skills is necessary.

Organizing for action means creating useful, workable systems and habits for accessing information quickly, tracking commitments, and managing e-mail effectively. The objective of a good filing system is retrieval, not storage. After you set up meaningful categories and locate items where you can quickly find them again, it is important to develop a practice of sorting through files regularly. Though this can seem like a waste of time, looking for lost items wastes more. According to one study of offices, 15 percent of papers are irretrievably lost regularly, and each lost paper costs the business an average of $120.

The initial backlog is daunting. Beginning to sort through piles of accumulated paper can create anxiety because they are often the build-up of unmade decisions, projects to let go of, or confusion about tasks. The piles are there because we don't want to deal with them. Remember your purpose and vision for managing time. Enlist the support of an executive assistant or professional organizing coach. Repeated short efforts (e.g. 10-30 minutes per day) can eliminate unwieldy piles. Building in the habit of regular filing-once per day, week, or month-prevents the piles from coming back.

A second organizing challenge is tracking the commitments you make to others and others make to you. Leaders establish commitments in many places throughout the day. We recommend putting them in writing immediately and then, at least once a day, compiling them in one location. However the list is developed, it is important to select a manageable number of items for each day before the rush descends-ideally the night before or before opening one's e-mail in the morning. Finally, we recommend that leaders conduct a weekly review to update their commitments and ensure that others are keeping their commitments to them.

E-mail has become the boon and bane of many people's organizational lives. It is a timesaving device, which, along with cell phones and Blackberries, has ironically left us with less discretionary time than ever before. One recent client labeled it "a faceless way of delegating thoughtlessly." We have found that some people can make best use of e-mail when they follow certain guidelines, such as those in "Managing E-Mail." Leaders also have a responsibility to help their teams and organizations create effective e-mail protocols.

Changing Behavior

Time management practices are habits of thought and action, and thus require time and effort to change. The challenge is to alter some very personal ways of being in the world. While personal change is by definition individual, we suggest that the following seven steps may help the process (see "Changing Behavior").

CHANGING BEHAVIOR
Know Your Purpose for Change
Establishing a powerful purpose for change is key to sustaining energy and motivation for engaging new practices. Ask, "What are the costs of continuing this way, and what are the benefits of changing?" The costs of mismanaging time can be very high: sustaining damage to one's work reputation, losing health and well being, and destabilizing love relationships. It's hard to face these costs; yet one's pain can lead to commitment to a more sustainable way of living. Identifying the benefits of change can also be motivating: a more stable family life, better health, a sense of well being, and greater work success might be among them.
Create Your Vision
Visioning helps people establish a new direction that lifts them out of today's problems. It is often used to describe a long-term, big-picture aspiration. Athletes use visioning to picture their desired high performance in a particular event. Visioning is a useful tool for re-crafting actual days and weeks. Without a picture of a desired daily life, it is easy to get lost in daily pressures. Some good questions for visioning are:, "How would I like my days to be? How can I imagine feeling on top of my work and energized? What details of the workday would I like to handle differently?"

MANAGING E-MAIL
Take Stock of Current Reality
Many people puzzle over how hard it is to get their time under control. They try to manage their time well, but outside pressures always seem to overwhelm them. Often this dilemma arises because they have never accurately assessed the sources of their time problems. They say, "It's my boss. It's the culture here. It's all those meetings. It's my Blackberry." Since these answers seem true, they don't feel the need to inquire more deeply.

Taking stock of current reality involves recognizing the cultural, organizational, and personal pressures that influence your workload; accurately describing your current work day; and identifying underlying beliefs and assumptions that determine how you spend your time. It requires taking personal responsibility for the way things are-recognizing both one's conscious choices and unconscious reactions to external pressures.

People often avoid exploring their time management challenges because they feel they don't have time to look at how they behave. Surprisingly, though, self-observation doesn't take extra time. It takes a willingness to activate an inner witnessing part of the self. When you lift the veil of labels, judgments, and illusions, connecting with reality in an accepting way can be remarkably satisfying. For many people, it is powerful to start simply observing and getting to know oneself without empowering the haranguing inner voices, without defending or shaming oneself.

Taking stock at an organizational level involves developing a systems diagnosis of the root causes underlying the organization's problems with time. For example, "Over-Promising and Under-Delivering" illuminated the reasons why the clinical informatics group felt so stressed and underresourced. It helped them have honest conversations about their responsibility for creating the dynamics they experienced and consider alternative responses to company-wide pressures.
Get Support
Support helps us make the often deep changes associated with reallocating our time. It can decrease the sense of isolation-the feeling of being the only one struggling with these issues. It can provide accountability or encouragement when the going gets rough. One powerful form of support is appreciative confrontation:, "You are very creative, visionary, and wonderful to work with in many ways, but I don't trust that you will meet our deadlines. It is important that we work together differently."

Talking about disorganization or poor time management habits is intensely personal. Thus, getting support should be done with care. Support for change helps counter the type of encouragement that reinforces our current behavior., "You're not leaving early are you? We have so much to get done." Or, "I can't believe you got that done ahead of schedule. Are you sure you covered everything?" Or, "You were working until ten last night. I wish everyone had your dedication."
Identify Strategies for Time Management
We have covered many strategies for time management. But, of course, there are many more. Time management strategies range from clarifying mission, vision, and goals to managing to-do lists, phone calls, and software such as Microsoft Outlook with skill. The key is to implement a few strategies that yield high leverage for change.
Take Effective Action
In Man's Search for Meaning, Viktor Frankl noted, "It is not enough that we observe ourselves; we truly learn about ourselves as we take action towards a meaningful goal."

Taking action in this framework involves testing and experimenting. There is no "one size fits all" time management strategy. The key question is, "What works for you? How will you try on a strategy and customize it for yourself?" The main thing is to look for leverage and the most impactful change. For example, one of our clients determined that getting more sleep would dramatically help his performance at work. He had been trying to save time by sleeping less, but that was backfiring because his afternoons were so unproductive. Another client decided to stop working at home after dinner. The work she did late at night was uniformly poor quality and always had to be redone. A third client decided to try out the Friday afternoon weekly review.

As we take action to change ourselves, we must remember that change can be slow. It often takes repetition and recommitment, like learning any new behavior. Here it is important to not give up on change, but to try again-and again if necessary. The stakes are too high to give up.
Go Deeper
Resolutions to change are inherently suspect. We move forward only to encounter all the reasons we were better off in the first place. The Biblical story of the Hebrews' exodus from Egypt dramatically points out how people conditioned to servitude would rather remain enslaved than risk becoming free. In their book, How the Way We Talk Can Change the Way We Work, Robert Kegan and Lisa Lahey coin the term "competing commitments" to capture the payoffs we experience in the way things are and the costs we might have to incur to achieve the results we want.

Making new behavior stick requires clarifying the benefits of not changing and the costs of change-and then testing to see if those factors are indeed as powerful as the benefits of change and the costs of not changing. For example, Beth, a member of the clinical informatics group, agreed with her supervisor about the risks of saying "No" to clients' requests. However, she decided to test her assumptions by asking clients for a specific amount of time to get back to them with a carefully thought-out answer about what she could-and could not-deliver. She discovered that, while some clients viewed her as uncooperative, others respected her professionalism. She decided to continue her new behavior, having determined that the costs were well worth the rewards.

Summary

In today's 24/7 world, leaders need to focus on ensuring the sustainable productivity of themselves and the people in their organizations. They need to think of time management as a discipline of making wise and sometimes difficult choices-not an exercise in doing more with less. They can do this by identifying and reducing phantom workload, drawing on numerous strategies to manage time more effectively, tapping resources other than time to increase productivity and effectiveness, and engaging themselves and others in a process of changing behavior. Their lives and the lives of others depend on their ability to manage this precious resource.
Marilyn Paul, Ph. D. (mpaul@bridgewaypartners.com), and David Peter Stroh (dstroh@bridgewaypartners.com) are the principals of Bridgeway Partners (www.bridgewaypartners.com). They combine over 40 years' experience consulting to business, public, and social sector organizations around the world. Marilyn's special areas of interest are time management, disorganization, and managing workload systemically. She is the author of the acclaimed book It's Hard to Make a Difference When You Can't Find Your Keys (Penguin Compass, 2004). David was a co-founder of Innovation Associates, the pioneering consulting firm in the area of organizational learning. His expertise lies in visionary planning, leadership development, systems thinking, organization design, and change management. This article originally appeared in Reflections: The SoL Journal on Knowledge, Learning, and Change, Volume 7 Number 4. It is reprinted here with permission. For more information about SoL and its publications, go to www.solonline.org.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Managing Your Time as a Leader - The Systems Thinker

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
any leaders feel starved for time. Working under the assumption that longer hours lead to improved productivity, they drive themselves and others to increase effectiveness-then try to "squeeze in" good, quality time with loved ones. Working people are expected to run at a fast pace and be highly productive; yet at the same time, there ...