I had a friend who was a Methodist minister and he once told me that a good preacher would spend one-third of his time working on his weekly sermon. My initial reaction was that this seemed like a lot of time to spend on a 15-20 minute ‘speech’, but the more I thought about it, the more sense it made. To keep the parishioners headed in the right direction, the message needed to be inspiring and meaningful. If the message is going to have a positive impact on the listener, the speaker needs to make sure they give themselves a lot of time to think about the point they want to make. Putting this in a more secular perspective, it is very important to ‘sit and think’ about the messages we use to inspire those who work for us.
With so many ways for us to receive messages these days, it is especially important that we, as leaders, become more effective at developing and delivering our message. During the times we are the busiest, it is extremely important to get our message to our teams in the most effective manner possible. From a practical perspective, being an effective communicator and leader becomes an exercise in time management.
A few years ago I was asked to take on a large amount of additional work. At that time I was running the supply chain for one business, and was asked to take on a second business. I wanted to accept this challenge because this business had been my responsibility in the past and I had an emotional attachment to it.
This ‘dual’ business management scenario re-emphasized the need to prioritize my time and make sure I provided clear direction to both of my teams, while satisfying the needs of my internal customers.
You get to decide where your time goes. You can either spend it moving forward, or you can spend it putting out fires. You decide. And if you don’t decide, others will decide for you.” ― Tony Morgan
During this hectic time, I started my workdays with every intention of spending at least the first 30 minutes planning the day. Though I started an hour before most people got to work, things always happened that required my immediate attention, and burned through my planning time.
When I was in firefighting mode, other important work that wasn’t urgent, didn’t get done, and this ‘slippage’ created situations that would require even more firefighting in the future. It was a vicious cycle: firefighting led to more firefighting. If time was not being set aside to trouble-shoot and correct the issues causing the problems, the situation was going to deteriorate. Sound familiar?
Knowing it was very important to craft my message for my team, I had to make a conscious effort to find the time for planning and setting direction. I found a few basic time-management principles that helped me push the pile forward.
- Find a strategy to categorize your activities. One method was dividing up daily tasks into 4 categories: Q1 – Important and Urgent; Q2 – Important but Not Urgent; Q3 – Not Important and Urgent; Q4 – Not Important and Not Urgent. Once the activities are sorted, one can decide which tasks to attack. My familiarity with this methodology was from a time management course I took based on Steven Covey’s model. One of the primary recommendations of this method is to make sure there is a sincere attempt to focus time on the Q2 items, which were ‘Important, but Not Urgent’. Examples of these activities were physical exercise, reading industry-related articles for ideas, and taking time to evaluate and develop your own career. For more information on this concept, take a look at a great article from Sid Savarra that describes the quadrants and how your activities can be categorized. Covey’s Time Management matrix.
- Focus on understanding where your time goes every day. If you track your activities for a few days, you can start to see what is taking up your time. Once you have a list, evaluate whether or not the activity will help you make progress. Looking at situations and tasks we are asked to address with this ‘go / no go’ perspective can help sort out the non-value added tasks. For example, attending a Marketing update meeting on changing advertising agency strategies was not going to impact how the supply chain operated. However, if the marketing strategy was to increase the amount of money spent advertising, then the discussion was very worthwhile and would have an impact on the supply chain.
- Enlist your boss to help prioritize the activities. About once a week I had discussions with my boss regarding all of the activities on my list, identifying the ones I felt would not help the business make progress. Most bosses are interested in making progress and are amenable to worthwhile suggestions. Even if they want everything on the list to be done, they will help prioritize the work. These meetings are also a good time to keep your boss updated on the progress of each activity.
In the end, I would block out time on my schedule for planning every day. I would go ‘radio silent’ during this time and only answer the phone if it was an important caller, i.e. the boss or my wife. I may not have been able to spend a third of my time on the message, but the more time I spent on it, the better my team responded and the more we accomplished. In the end, making the time to ‘sit and think’ was always worthwhile.