Organizational Time Management for Leaders

Jonette Crowley, principal of Enlightened Leadership Solutions, shares an article she wrote about her perspectives on time management that she uses in executive and leadership training.

We’ve all taken various Time Management courses over the years – we
make lists, we prioritize A, B, & C; we plan to do important things not
just urgent things first. Yet the companies that we work for
unintentionally thwart our best attempts to do the right things at the
right time.

I’ve polled many of my executive friends and clients to see what they
say are the biggest obstacles to productivity. Here they are in order of
frustration:
Planned Meetings (this actually takes the blue, red & white ribbons)
Email overload
Informal “doorway meetings”
Incoming phone calls
Of course the culprit in all of this is just way too much to do in too
little time (And the company dares to list work/life balance as one of the
objectives!)

Here are some ideas we’ve come up with so that the organization can
support you in managing your time better. We’ll start with the topic of
meetings and get to the other categories in later articles. Of course, some
of these ideas will need to be modified to fit a particular workplace, but
you can get the drift.

MEETINGS
Have you seen the poster that says: “We’re going to keep on having
these meetings until we can figure out why nothing is getting done around
here”?

Meeting Periods
Remember college? Classes were often 50 minutes with a 10-minute passing
period. Woe to the professor who tried to keep you late. You were perfectly
within your rights to load up your backpack and leave. Remember too, that
they managed to get a lot packed into those 50-minute periods?
Suggestion: Have all meetings start promptly on the hour and end promptly
50 minutes later unless they are specified as a 2-perriod or 3-period
meeting. (3period meetings should be pretty rare).

Blackout Times
We can’t have work/life balance at 7am or 4:30pm if we offer flex items
and continue to schedule meetings. If you’re serious about allowing
employees to have a life, all meetings should be scheduled between 10 am
and 4pm. The reason we say no meetings before 10 is that every employee
deserves to have the first hour of the day to get organized and get a few
pressing things accomplished before they are called away.

Project Wednesdays
How many times do we feel forced to procrastinate an important project
because we just don’t have 3 or 4 hours of uninterrupted time to work on
it? Here’s the deal! Wednesdays are project days: No meetings, no
expectation that phone calls will be returned or emails answered. The
office door is closed. If you need information from someone for
Wednesdays’ project, you’d better get it handled on Tuesday. The
project day is the day you work on your “big rocks”. It only works if
it is held sacred by the entire organization or at least a department. Just
think of what you could plan to get done if you had a whole day every week
to work on something without distraction!

Meeting Productivity
Some companies require the person calling a meeting to email out or P.A.L.
to everyone at least 2 days before the meeting. The P.A.L. clearly
specified
Purpose
Agenda Items
Length
This helps keep meetings finite and to the point. Promptness must become a
cultural norm. A 10-minute late start in a meeting with 12 people is 2
Executive hours wasted, kaput, down the drain… For fun, we sometimes
throw paper wads at latecomers. It’s light-hearted, but it works.
If the meeting honcho can’t clearly state the purpose and some agenda
items, then it’s not likely to be the best use of your time. This brings
us to the next point, a radical idea…

Meetings Optional
Having Mandatory gatherings sometimes allows us to be sloppy in managing
the tightness and effectiveness of a meeting; people are there because they
have to be there. What if we trusted our employees to know what’s the
very best use of their time? If we ran informative, decisive, well-directed
meetings, that given their job priorities, people would choose to show up.

FORWARD FOCUSED MEETINGS
One of the reasons we have so many meetings is that they’re often so
awful that nothing actually gets done. Forward Focus™ completely changes the dynamic!

Jonette Crowley and the Enlightened Leadership Team