By Amber Van Schooneveld
One of your most valuable assets as a leader is your time. But many leaders get caught in the hamster wheel of meetings and seemingly endless tasks. Truly great leaders aren’t managed by their calendars, but master time management through relentless focus on their primary mission.
At the Global Leadership Summit, we have the privilege of hearing from leadership experts on their best time-management strategies for leaders. Here are four of our favorites. They will help you be more productive, focus and lead with impact. Which will you try?
Rory Vaden: Multiply Your Time With the 30X Rule
Andy Stanley says, “Leadership isn’t about getting things done right. It’s about getting things done through other people.” So many leaders spend too much time on tasks that don’t need to belong to them, things they could delegate to others.
According to productivity expert Rory Vaden, leaders need to think broader about what they delegate: “You can delegate anything,” Vaden insists. For example, delegating a task that takes only five minutes a day might seem like a minimal gain, but it can have an exponential impact.
Vaden suggests the 30X rule: Spend 30 times more time than it would take you to do a task once to train someone else to do it — or to automate it. For a 5-minute task, that would be an investment of 150 minutes. But over the course of a year, those five minutes a day add up to more than 19 hours of saved time — a 733% return on investment.
“Multiply your time by giving yourself the emotional permission to spend time on things today that will give you more time tomorrow,” Vaden says.
Ask yourself, what am I currently doing that someone else could do? Are there processes or systems that could automate it for me? Then intentionally invest time today to free up your tomorrow.
Juliet Funt: Plan Strategic Pauses
Many leaders rush from one meeting to the next with no time spared to process, strategize or prioritize. Our daily race is, according to high-performance expert Juliet Funt, “100% exertion and 0% thoughtfulness.”
But unfilled time is crucial to innovation and strategy:
“The pause is a formidable source of professional power… It’s the place where we slow down enough so that great ideas can grace us with their presence,” Funt says.
Funt reminds us that Jack Welch, who increased the value of GE by 4000%, spent one hour a day in “looking out of the window time.” Bill Gates, former CEO of Microsoft, invests two weeks a year in an isolated cabin taking a “think week,” filled with reading and devoid of distractions.
As a leader, have you budgeted time with no goals and no boundaries? Look at your calendar and schedule in “white space” to allow for vital time of introspection and reflection so that you will have the acuity and clarity to plan and dream for the future. Wondering how you can possibly find the time for strategic pauses? Our next expert has the solution.
Craig Groeschel: Stop Doing Too Much
It’s counterintuitive, but doing too much limits us as leaders from having greater impact. According to Craig Groeschel, bestselling author and Senior Pastor of Life.Church:
“Doing too much doesn’t just steal your energy, it suffocates your productivity.”
When achievement-driven leaders take on more and more, they become less and less effective. Craig’s solution? “Do more of what matters most.”
Evaluate every task. The top two tiers of tasks are: mission critical and strategic. The bottom tiers are, while meaningful, not vital and externally initiated. Craig recommends eliminating as many tasks as possible from the bottom tiers so you can focus whole-heartedly on your mission.
Listen to Craig’s podcast on habits of great leaders for additional steps on growing your impact through subtraction, not addition.
James Clear: Make 1% Improvements
When our calendars are overwhelming, the task to simplify can also feel overwhelming. But James Clear, bestselling author of “Atomic Habits,” champions the 1% improvement:
“If you get one percent better each day for one year, you’ll end up thirty-seven times better by the time you’re done.”
Changes that seem insignificant at first compound over time to make a drastic difference. For example, if you can find 10 minutes a day to read, it won’t make an enormous difference in a day or a week. But compounded over years, you’ll become more wise, educated and informed.
Clear says, “excellence is not about radical changes, but about accruing small improvements over time.” What are the 1% improvements you can make to your time management that will deliver dividends to your future?
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Which of these time-management strategies for leaders will you take? Will you invest in delegating or make 1% improvements to your calendar? Will you eliminate lower-tier tasks or plan strategic pauses? Crafting a time-management plan today will benefit not only your schedule but also those you lead — because everyone wins when the leader gets better.
