8 Steps Leaders Can Take to Manage Time Effectively

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This article is part of the GVL leadership essentials series that shares highly practical insights we’ve learned from experience with new leaders to help them efficiently lead and manage teams.

We live in tough economic times, and there’s a lot of pressure on leaders at all levels to deliver. Whether you lead your small business, a department, or a company with thousands of employees, the pressure has never been higher.

Aside from this pressure, one of the biggest challenges facing leaders is time management. There’s such a huge demand for leaders’ time that it seems like there just aren’t enough hours in a day to get things done.

Here’s the shocker: If you crack the puzzle of effective time management, you’re more likely to survive and thrive during these trying economic times.

In this article, I’ll share the best practices in time management and hopefully show you how to successfully captain your business, department, or organization through the turbulent waters we’re going through.

Step 1: Treat Time as the Finite Resource It Is

The most effective best practice in time management is saying no.

The reality is that your time is limited. Additionally, as a leader, your time is highly valuable. How you spend it will determine whether your employees continue to have a job, how successful your department or company will be, and so on.

Below is an example about something else that’s finite — your salary.

Maybe you want to take a one-week trip to the Masai Mara, and it costs Ksh 50,000, which is the salary you receive every month. You can decide to take the trip, but if you do so, you won’t be able to pay rent, buy food, and pay for transport for the next month.

The prudent thing to do would be to first set aside money for the basics like rent and food, then maybe save Ksh 5,000 towards your trip to the Mara.

If you don’t spend a finite resource well, you’re courting disaster. And spending time well involves spending it on the things that truly matter to the success of your organization. Unfortunately, those priorities aren’t always as clear as they should be.

Step 2: Let Priorities Inform How You Spend Your Time

When I used to work as an editor, I was responsible for the success of the content published on the platforms I managed. Performance indicators included how many people read and shared our articles.

But I also had other roles. For example, I had to review every article before it was published. And sometimes, I had to choose appropriate images to accompany each article.

It was easy for me to spend a lot of my editing time reviewing articles and deciding which image would be best and very little time understanding our readers and finding out what content they liked to read.

Every leader faces this challenge. The temptation to prioritize short-term operational decisions over strategic work isn’t easy to resist — especially if you don’t recognize what’s happening.

Unsurprisingly, choosing the best images for the articles I published had very little impact on success compared to understanding our target audience. It was easy to find myself in a situation where our articles had the best images, but they were being read by very few people because they were irrelevant to the target audience. And this would have led to me losing my job.

Knowing that priorities should influence your schedules is easy, but ensuring that they do is a bit difficult.

GVL Tip: With ClickUp, a comprehensive software for digitizing work, you can digitally track your work and articulate priorities, and it’s easy to ensure that you only do work that helps you move your organization closer to its goals.

Step 3: Define Your Priorities And Alter Your Schedule Accordingly

If someone came up to you and asked what your priorities are as a leader, would you have an easy time listing them, or would you fumble?

As a CEO, you should prioritize the activities that help you create more shareholder value. As the leader of a non-profit organization like Rotaract, you should prioritize the activities that best help you achieve missions like solving societal problems.

A common practice among successful leaders is to list five priorities and ensure they take up 90% of their time. This helps leaders avoid spending valuable time on activities that seem important but aren’t crucial to the organization’s success.

Going back to the editing example, I spent very little time choosing images and a lot of time understanding my readers and analyzing performance insights to discover opportunities for improvement.

That said, activities like choosing images and writing articles are important.

As an editor, spending a lot of my time writing articles would be a mistake. Instead, I should spend a huge chunk of my time ensuring that the right articles are being written, which brings us to the next step.

Step 4: Realize That, As a Leader, You Can’t Do Everything Important

We’ve already talked about eliminating activities that don’t align with your priorities from your schedule. However, once you’ve eliminated the non-important activities, plenty of important ones will still compete for your time.

Of all the important activities, first recognize the ones that only you can handle and prioritize them in your schedule. For example, if there needs to be a meeting between you and another organization to discuss a strategic partnership, you may need to take care of that yourself.

Next, identify the activities that others can handle. For example, as an editor, I can let my writers take care of all writing assignments. Depending on how competent my writers are, I can even delegate writing tasks I consider delicate.

If I can’t delegate some writing assignments because they’re too important and no one else can handle them, I should focus on capacity development. I can identify one or two good writers and coach them intensively for some time to ensure they’re good enough to handle my assignments.

Often, delegating comes hand in hand with coaching and mentorship. Coaching done right can help free up the demands on your time as a leader.

But there’s another class of activities that requires you to get administrative support. Activities like preparing reports, writing memos, and doing research are important. But they can reduce the time you spend on critical aspects like business strategy, and if your budget allows, you should invest in an administrative assistant.

Most CEOs already have such assistants. But unless you’re at the apex of a huge organization, there’ll likely be a notion that administrative support is unnecessary. Well, it is necessary, especially if you need to free up time for important activities.

Step 5: Change How You Do Meetings

Meetings are a part of any leader’s life. Whether they’re meetings with the board, shareholders, managers that report to you, or potential business partners, meetings take up a lot of leaders’ time.

Surprisingly, most meetings aren’t necessary, especially since they take up valuable time that could be used more productively.

For example, I manage a company where the managers under me report via Google Sheets. Instead of having meetings to give me a sense of how we’re doing, the managers feed data into Google Sheets that I review periodically. I then schedule meetings if I notice a problem or when we need to discuss strategic decisions.

This way, we eliminate meetings whose sole purpose is reporting.

When we do have meetings, the agenda is crystal clear and communicated beforehand to ensure we don’t waste time discussing unnecessary items. We also have strict time limits, which help us avoid detours.

Here’s a rule you can follow to determine whether meetings are necessary: If the information is flowing one way, it doesn’t need to happen in a meeting. They can send you an email or report in another way.

On the other hand, if the agenda of a meeting is to consider different points of view and make an important decision, and if your input as a leader is critical, attend that meeting.

If the decision can be made without you, you have no business being there.

Step 6: If You Spend Time Somewhere, Make the Most of It

Among other things, leadership is about balancing. As much as you need to spend time strategizing and reviewing performance against goals, you need to motivate and coach employees, meet with external partners, attend networking events, listen to your managers’ concerns, and so on.

And since your time is a scarce resource, you need to maximize what you get out of every unit of time.

For example, if you’re traveling to a city for an important face-to-face meeting with a supplier, you can schedule other upcoming meetings in that city to happen during your visit there.

If you decide to spend some hours on the factory floor, you can meet with the factory manager, do some rounds to see how things go, interact with some workers, meet with the labor union representative, and so on.

Make sure your presence is felt wherever you go and that you make a clear impact.

That way, you can visit the factory floor once every quarter and make more impact than a manager who does it monthly.

Making the most of your time frees you up to handle other activities.

Step 7: Consider the Time Costs of New Initiatives

Creativity is essential to organizational success. When creativity is baked into organizational culture, you’ll always have new initiatives cropping up.

An initiative can be helpful but end up failing because the organization didn’t have enough time to make it a success. Additionally, an organization can be overloaded by multiple initiatives to the point where none is successful.

Before an initiative is approved, consider the time that the initiative will require from leaders and other stakeholders. In some cases, you’ll find that the organization simply doesn’t have enough time to make an initiative successful, and such an initiative should be shelved.

But how do you even know how much time you have?

Step 8: Track Your Time

A leader’s time is like an organization’s money. Any organization that doesn’t practice fiscal discipline is doomed to fail. Organizations go through a lot of trouble to develop budgets and track expenditure, and you should do the same for your time.

Tracking your time is the only way to ensure you spend 90% of it on your top-five priorities.

I track my time with ClickUp, a website I use to digitize all my work, divide it into tasks, and track how much time I spend on each task.

The Takeaway

As a leader, your time is scarce and highly valuable, and you should always be conscious of this. Moreover, how you spend your time is directly proportional to the success of your organization.

Ensuring that your schedule aligns with the organization’s top priorities is a reliable way to increase the likelihood of success, especially in trying times.

GVL offers basic leadership and management training to both individuals and organizations. Contact us to equip yourself or your team with the skills necessary to lead successfully across situations