4 pillars I follow for effective time management + 6 exercises 💊
My situation back in 2014:
I was CTO and I worked around 11hrs a day. Basically, two shifts in just one.
Every day I had an average of 8 to 10 things to do — A list that was growing up as the week went by.
Everything had the same priority and I used to live in an infinite loop of discarding tasks that made me feel really overwhelmed!
Even when I went out for a walk or did other activities, I felt guilty for not getting those tasks done or finished before.
The urgencies didn’t allow me to enjoy my quality and personal time (family, hobbies, learning), and I felt frustrated!
Worse yet, I felt like a fraud to my team because I wasn't up to their technical level. I couldn't help them to manage their time effectively or become better professionals, so the company's results were suffering.
Actually, as it was so much the pressure I felt, my wife had to set the limits with a special gift for my birthday:
When you land into a management role, there is no awareness that everything changes, and with it, your agenda and priorities.
The manager’s duties require focus, clarity and creativity... you can't do it with your head full of things and dedicating the "leftover time" after 5 meetings in a row.
You have to make room for the new (both mental and temporal)
Just think about the impact on your team: if you don't manage your agenda effectively, much less you will be able to optimize your team's and their work. — Your chaos will be reflected in them.
Managers are role models in every aspect, whether we like it or not. You have a huge impact on the lives of every single member of your team (and beyond), but that can backfire if the model is not the right one.
If you stay until 20:00, don't expect them to react to your policy that they should leave early.
If you don’t prioritize your own learning and growth, don’t expect them to be proactive when choosing courses or training.
Lead by example!
My goal with this newsletter is that you get the most important tasks of the week done and gain focus time to do it.
For that, you will apply the 4 pillars I follow for effective time management through practical exercises.
Are you ready?
Baseline
Let’s start by reflecting on your current situation!
Start your week answering the following questions:
How productive do you feel, from 1 to 10?
How would you evaluate your focus, from 1 to 10?
How much control over your agenda do you feel you have, from 1 to 10?
It’s important you write down your answers, so, on Friday and after applying the 4 pillars, you can do a retrospective exercise and compare your progress.
4 Pillars For Effective Time Management:
1. Set clear priorities
Setting clear priorities helps you focus on what matters most, preventing you from thinking so much about your entire to-do list. As you are not going to do it right now, it only makes you feel overwhelmed. How to do it?
📝 Quick exercise: MIT (Most Important Task)
Just define at the end of the day the first thing you will do the next day, the most critical one, and write it down.
Then, every day, first thing in the morning, you just do it.
Remember, first means no email, no slack, no meetings. Just. Do. It. If there is something else on your agenda the first time in the morning, try to move it and make sure you block that first hour for the subsequent days and weeks.
You may have tried doing this before without even knowing that the MIT strategy was actually a thing :).
2. Blocking time
Get back control of your time. You need to focus work on the manager’s important things: systems design, performance reviews, goal setting…And that focus needs enough time to get into the flow, not just 15 minutes slots spreaded all over the week!
📝 Quick exercise:
Try to block 3 slots of 2 hours for deep & shallow work (like MIT). That means 15% of your week.
Think about moving some 1:1s, avoiding non-critical meetings or delegating part of your tasks.
Try to gain this time in the moments of the day when you feel more productive. Trying to focus for 2 hours in a row immediately after lunch is an impossible mission (did you hear about food comma?)
Finally, add a 10-minute buffer after meetings to reorder the notes, write down TODOs, and take a break before the next thing. Change the environment, drink some water, close your eyes and breathe for 1-2 minutes. — Don’t take your phone, walk a bit, stretch your arms and neck. This will close the chapter and re-energize you for the next one.
3. Distractions
Do you struggle with managing your attention, energy, and time effectively?
Do you sometimes feel overwhelmed and don't have the resources to increase your concentration?
If your answer is yes to any question, you might have problems with distractions. But no worries, we all face them — even daily! Slack notifications, social media, messages, etc… they are time robbers if not managed properly.
How to avoid them?
📝 Quick exercise:
Set Do Not Disturb status every time you are focused (like in the blocks of the previous exercise, MIT, lunch, meetings…).
Use time management tools to keep focused: The Pomodoro technique can help you.
Set a time for communications: messages, emails, etc. 2-3 times per day should be more than enough. If they happen in moments of low focus i.e., after lunch, much better.
Set clear expectations by communicating the measures to your team and stakeholders, so they know there will be a delay. Add a way to communicate urgencies (real urgencies!), so they know when they can count on you.
4. Avoid multitasking
Context switching, task switching, multitasking… whatever you want to call these behaviors, they’re incredibly hard on your already-taxed brain. And while the immediate costs might feel small, the compounding impact on your productivity is staggering.
📝 Quick exercise:
Get focus on just one thing, the most important (MIT again), only one at a time. If you complete one task daily, at the end of the week you will have completed the 5 most important tasks.
Have you ever applied any of these exercises?
Final Exercise
Once you have started on Monday with your reflection on your current situation, applied the 4 pillars, and followed the exercises, it is time to close the week with a reflection of your performance.
On Friday, at the end of the day, ask yourself:
How productive do you feel, from 1 to 10?
How would you evaluate your focus, from 1 to 10?
How much control over your agenda do you feel you have, from 1 to 10?
Compare the results with the values written on Monday
Propose 3 measures to increase the values by 1 point
Repeat next week! 🌀
This is the topic we are working on this month in Lidr Academy, as part of the Self-leadership course. And we will put it into practice in our upcoming live workshop.
How? Each member will create his new agenda based on these and other recommendations and evaluate it in a 3-weeks period. Want to join us? Click here to know more.
🤚 But…
If you want to speed up your tech leadership career, we also work in-depth into time management in the session 3 of our Ignite Mentoring Program. The high-performance training that prepares you to handle Tech Lead or Engineering Management positions.
Interested in knowing more about the program? Click here
That’s all for now!
Hope you get the most out of this newsletter and put into practice the tips and exercises I just shared.
These pillars have helped me A LOT to find balance and manage my time properly in the last 7 years, and I hope today these pillars become a source of change for your time management.
Willing to hear any improvement you make, just reply to this email or leave a comment. :)
See you in the next pill 💊
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