Make Your Schedule Reflect Your Priorities

In leadership, nothing matters more than time. Schedule your day accordingly.

In leadership, nothing matters more than time.

Unfortunately, too many leaders’ calendars are filled with meetings that aren’t aligned to their highest priorities. These leaders have weekly check-ins with several direct reports, recurring team meetings, and, most problematically, many abruptly scheduled one-off discussions due to an open-door policy that allows others to take their time.

Rather than allowing your calendar to be filled with other people’s needs, as a leader, you should build your calendar around your most important priorities.

For example, think of your calendar as similar to the famous analogy of filling a jar with rocks and sand. If you fill the jar up with sand first, then you won’t be able to put any rocks in the jar. Conversely, you can get plenty of rocks and sand into the jar by putting the rocks in first and then pouring the sand into the crevasses.

In this analogy, the rocks represent your most important priorities, and the sand represents unnecessary meetings and busy work that prevents you from getting the most crucial things done.

All things being equal, leaders who manage their time well perform far better than leaders who do not. Leaders are also often the people who can most benefit from uninterrupted time for deep work and strategy.

There are two fundamental laws of time management:

• If you make your time available to other people, it will be taken from you. That’s why one of my mentors loves to say that while he had an open-door policy, his door was not always open.

• No matter how many hours you work, you can always fill your schedule with meetings if you aren’t careful. There is always another meeting.

This is why leaders must be intentional about limiting the time they give away. The best solution I’ve seen for this is time blocking.  

Time blocking is a process where you fill your calendar with things that matter to you most first and are intentional about assigning a purpose to every hour of the day. And you shouldn’t just block time for your work priorities; you should block off time for life priorities such as family, exercise and travel as well.

Time blocking is a simple process that yields significant, immediate results. To get started, follow these steps.