In the previous article of the #Tips4Leaders series, I’ve presented you with the 3 top things to consider when facilitating.
In today’s issue, I’m going to walk you through the steps I follow to keep me focused and get the best out the limited amount of time that I’ve in a day. That’s right, we are talking about time management here.
Why should we care?
Time is valuable to all of us and if you think about it, getting a handle about how to do it isn’t an easy task. But if we want to excel as what we do as leaders, being able to manage our time properly is a must.
How do I do it?
Inspired from Peter Bregman‘s WBECS16 pre-summit talk about his 18 Minutes method, I’ve learned that it could definitely help us with finding focus, mastering distractions, and get the Right Things Done. What I’ve loved about this coaching talk was that “Peter” acknowledged the fact that even if we want to, there is not enough time to do all what we want in live, so then we need to focus on what’s important and start doing it right now. His formula? Select your top six (6) focus for the year, then put actions into work by adding them into your personal calendar and then invest 18 minutes daily to keep your focus on the right things.
How I’ve started using it?
I’ve started by choosing my main focuses for this year, and here they are:
1) Be myself as much as I can.
2) Continue growing family and friends bond.
3) Nurture curiosity through learning new stuff.
4) Write and speak about my ideas.
5) Help others by sharing what I’ve learned.
6) Stay out of my comfort zone.
Then what?
Every day in the morning, I take 5 minutes to populate my personal kanban with those activities that are in sync with my main focuses. During the day, I will move each task through my personal kanban workflow, I mean from “To Do” to “Doing” to “Done” and by the end of the day, I take 5 minutes to reflect about how the day went, using a basic retrospective framework composed by the following three questions: what was done during the day?, what went well?, what needs improvement?.
How it feels?
I’ve just started but it feels great so far. I’m feeling more empowered, happy, at choice and of course extremely motivated to continue doing it when it’s need it.
This is it, as simple as it seems. But remember: “As leaders, we have a lot of things to manage different than time, like connection, stress, listening and perspective” like Henna Inam has said on her Forbes article “Time Management 101: Stop managing time”.
But tell me, how do you do it? What do you do to manage your time properly so then you keep yourself focused on what’s important?
Curious about how I do it?
Take a look to my workbook “Forming Agile Teams”, let’s connect and change the world one team at a time.
References
Here what others have said about the subject that could give you more hints:
