How do you feel about time?

Do you have a good relationship with time, are you and time on a break, or do you avoid it entirely? If you’re like most people, you probably have an okay relationship with time, but you can get overwhelmed, stressed, and exhausted now and then when you feel like time has the upper hand. Don’t worry, I’m going to cover a couple of tips to help you stay on top of time and keep the upper hand in the eternal relationship between human beings and time.

New leaders have more freedom in their daily schedule; instead of being told what to work on and when to do it, they have to decide what tasks they should be working on. When you add in the daily drama of personnel issues coupled with customer complaints, you can quickly become overwhelmed, focusing on the matters directly in front of you. This tunnel vision will cause new managers to fail. They’ll only focus on the fires and forget about next week’s staffing plans or training their new hires.

Stop me if you’ve been here before…

You’re a new manager, and it’s the start of your shift. You have two employees who called off, you have three interviews today, one new hire to train, and you have performance reviews due next week. This could easily overwhelm the most experienced manager. Unfortunately, it's already too late if you’re stuck in this situation. Here’s what you can do to prevent storms of competing responsibilities from arriving at once.

Three tips:

• Spread out long-term tasks like quarterly reviews. Do one or two a week instead of all 12 in the last week of the quarter. You can use the same methodology for long-term projects.

• Build systems for repeatable processes. You can build a training system for all new employees and use your existing employees to help you run the training plan each time you have a new hire.

• Schedule daily office hours and blocks. Office hours should be dedicated to meetings, interviews, or other collaborative work. Your other blocks should be dedicated to individual work, where you can focus on planning, staffing, or daily adjustments due to call-offs.

You have to create control as a leader, which you can do by marking a few hours each week for long-term projects, building systems, and creating predictable routines that you can use to handle daily deliverables while planning for the future. Check out the video below to explore these three ideas in more detail!

Video Deep Dive:

Before you leave:

Take some time to think about your relationship with time. Could it be better? Do you feel like you need to have greater control over your time? If so, I encourage you to try one of the tips for a month.

1. Spread out long-term tasks like quarterly reviews.

2. Build systems for repeatable processes.

3. Schedule daily office hours and blocks.

See what happens. If it works, try another one! You can take control, but you have to be willing to work on it!

See ya next week!

-Rick

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