Time Management

One of my direct reports shared with me a TikTok that parodies what it’s like to have a millennial manager. The chaotic multi-tasking, humble use of Gen Z colloquialisms, wonky time management, messy bun — it was all so painfully spot-on.

Only one part of it stung. The time management. I’ve always had a funny relationship with time — probably a combination of general anxiety and chronic imposter syndrome. I’m not religious, but if work were my religion, my calendar would be my bible. And, like most congregants, I sometimes treat the Bible as a framework within which I need a little freedom.

When I was agency-side, I tried certain techniques to keep me profitable and timely. I blocked my calendar to track my hours (time is money, honey), I consolidated meetings to specific days of the week to offer me windows of work that felt productive.

We’ve become an over-scheduled workforce. Meetings upon meetings upon requests for new meetings upon holds for hypothetical meetings without requests or agendas. If I didn’t employ some sort of strategy to my “book” (the quotes are a function of my imposter syndrome re: coolness, because saying “book” for calendar feels akin to saying “dough” for money), I’d never get anything done.

The agency grind of striking a balance between billability and business growth wasn’t my only time-bound struggle. The shift to client-side work removed the onus of billable hours and replaced it with infamous boardroom “brainstorms” — the bane of my productivity. Fun, creative, and good for morale — all true until the evening exodus would begin with no work-product to round out the day.

I’m in the second-wind of my client-side era (at this point, a Taylor Swift reference feels like I am officially trying too hard…) and at perhaps my peak of self-awareness, confronting again that time management is perhaps going to plague me forever.

When you list “time management” as a development area, there may be internal hesitation because of what you fear it may communicate. But I’m here to be you inner millennial-manager monologue, reminding you that time management is all relative. Sure, it could be that you’re a procrastinator or that you spend too much time schmoozing. It could also mean you’re inherently over-extended and poorly resourced. Or that you could use some support in prioritizing and delegating. Acknowledging the issue is actually a great representation of business maturity; you’ve moved it out from being a blindspot and have it squarely in focus.

But can you conquer it? I read an article on HBR today that caught my attention with a super click-baity title around time management and leadership. There were some strong nuggets throughout the piece, but for the most part, I felt it was casting blame and shame in all the wrong ways. Time management is as much on the manager as it is on the organization, and to some extent, even direct reports.

Here’s my logic.

When you take responsibility and start to implement techniques and tools to better allocate and share your time (because that’s really part of management, it’s like the recruitment process is akin to those cheesy, cliche time-share sales pitches, and then your actual work life becomes bookable by anyone who needs you) you’re communicating that you’re invested, you recognize the trend, and you’re committed to continuously improving your way of working.

So, where do the others come into play?

The organization is as responsible for the setting of expectations and boundaries as the individual. If you’re lucky — and I consider myself almost as lucky as a four leaf clover with my current N+1 — you have an organization that recognizes that they’re part of the problem. They want to hear and help and give you the right resources, tools, etc.

The hardest part of this 3-way coexistence and its impact on time management is the direct reports. If you take the step toward self-awareness of your deficits, you also need to embrace transparency and put your proverbial cards on the table. I always volunteer things like, “I know my calendar may look cluttered and time with me may appear hard to book but…” followed by the ways to reach me. I know people value my approval on creative and copy, but I also clearly disclose that I refuse to be a bottleneck. I do my best to document my approach to review so that when time is scarce, the steps are clear to reach a close-to-Kirsch conclusion on copy. (Forgive me, again, trying too hard.)

That’s where the onus is shared; I’ve self-identified my development area and where I am always look to improve and grow. I expect, in return, the same growth in empowerment and entrepreneurial drive from my directs.

When they request my time, it’s a flag to me that I’m needed, because otherwise, my goal is to delegate and empower, with 1:1s keeping me in the loop before a problem pops up or a milestone is marked. It’s a partnership. And that’s where I feel like this article got it at least kind of wrong.

Each of its 5 list items were valid, but not quite functions of poor time management. In fact, maybe that’s the issue I take with it; I feel like I came to the article thinking there would be a nugget of time-related intel that I could apply to my forever quest to improve and grow. Instead, it pointed out bigger leadership flaws; it connected obvious dots between workload/bandwidth and respect for your team, but not necessarily personal time management outside of “Flaw #4: Never Being Available,” which even still was misleading because it was more about communication than time management.

It’s not my job (or maybe it is, for what I pay for my annual subscription!) to give the writer notes or feedback (but it’s a gift!), but if there’s one thing I wish she would have emphasized in her article, it’s that time management is a shared responsibility with strong ties to communication and leadership. I think it’s a stretch to say that time management on its own can be the litmus test through which you evaluate leadership strength. Blind spots and areas of development are things that can follow someone all the way up to the C-Suite. It’s how you disclose, focus, and manage them that differentiates your potential.

If this were a long-story-boring situation (because again, time management), I suppose the TL;DR is that I identified more with a generational meme than an HBR article. Go figure.