The one thing that'll fix being time poor

Ahoy legend. Welcome to another episode of the team buffalo podcast. I'm your host, Travis Thomas. Today's question is focused on leaders internally. So a little bit different. Previously, we've been talking about performance and staff and some of the team stuff. But what about you? What about you as the leader? One of the questions I get asked a fair bit is around time, it's a leader, you're incredibly time poor. And the question is, how do I get more time? And I think there's a second question that hangs off that that's probably just as important. But usually the root cause is, how do I know where I'm spending my time? Now, you might think, what a what an insane question, of course, I know where I'm spending my time I'm the one spending it Well, probably not as much as you think you do. And probably you perceive your time to be spent differently than it actually is. So I'm going to give you an insight or tool that I use with leaders when I run time management and better leadership outcomes workshops. And the focus on this tool is to understand where the truth really lies in your time usage, and then to be able to reclaim that time will come on the back of this. So we're not going to go into how to necessarily reclaim all of the time today because that's more practical and detail oriented. But I will give you the tool that helps you understand, well, where is my time actually going? And what do I do to take back that time? Great. So the big question is, Where's all my time going? And why the hell am I so time poor as a leader? Most leaders are pretty time poor. I think things that typically chew up your time that you could probably relate to almost immediately, or items such as meetings, meetings, meetings, staff issues, unplanned issues that people ask you for help on things you hadn't really thought about that have crept up on you. Random stakeholder, customer manager requests, all kinds of blend it to one of things that you couldn't have known would have happened, but did happen. And just a number of admin governance and random items that you have to deal with. Sound familiar? At least most of those if you're in corporate? Yep, for sure. So how do you take back some of that time? Well, the tactic is actually quite simple in its ability to be executed, but works phenomenally well. So what I'd say to you is, on Friday, or Sunday, depending on how you spend your time, and you prepare for the week ahead, you definitely should be preparing for the week ahead. If you're not, then you need to do that first. And that's your first win from this. But on Friday or Sunday, before you get stuck into your week, I want you to map out in your diary, whether it's Outlook or Gmail or whatever service your organization or business uses, I want you to map out your week. Now, I'm not oblivious to the fact and I'm a leader myself, that things will come up that are on planned, that's fine. So I would say to you map out capacity at a level that you think would be reasonable but not too casual. Because we need to be able to measure these things. So I would say to book out 70 to 80% of your time for the week and have it scheduled out that's a reasonable amount of time for a leader and that allows 20 to 30% of unplanned things. If you've got more than kind of 30% on plan, either you're working in a role where there's a lot of very like media request or PR so that's okay. If you're not in that kind of role. And you have more than 30% on planned, something's not right. So we need to get on to that. But go into your diary. Sunday night, we'll call it Sunday night, go into your diary, set your diary I want you to go through and just take all the things on your to do list all the things you know, you're going to do all of your meetings. And I want you just schedule them into your diary. If they're on your to do list, schedule them into your diary, why because if they're not in your to do list, they sure as hell are not going to get done. If they're not allocated time, things don't just magically get done. So allocate time to them, scheduling your one on ones meetings, all of those things. Now, once you've done that, I want you to take a screenshot of that week, your Monday to Friday or Tuesday, Saturday or whatever it is that you work, that's fine. Doesn't matter. Take a screenshot of the days you are meant to be working with the specific items named in there. So if you're going to have a meeting for an hour and a half on a Wednesday, with all staff, all staff meeting hour and a half should be in there. Take that screenshot right using your Windows or Mac easy screenshot feature. Now once you've taken your screenshot, I want you to save that to your desktop. And I want you to then keep that there for the rest of the week. But you don't need to look at it. Now once your week starts on Monday for the sake of argument as you're working through your day, how you actually spend your Time is how I want you to modify your diary. So if that Monday at 8am, you had a meeting scheduled and you have that meeting, fine, leave it. Now, if between nine and 10, you didn't have anything scheduled because you had time for the unplanned, and you get dragged into a second meeting or the first meeting goes late, I want you to put that in the diary. And then at 930, because you've finally gotten out of what was supposed to be an hour meeting is an hour and a half, you have a customer complaint or customer issue, put that in for however much time you spend. Now, you might notice then that we'll at 10 o'clock, you were meant to do this report you had on your to do list that you've scheduled in using the practice I just gave you. But at 10 o'clock staff member comes to all actually need to talk to you about something I'm struggling with or about a course I want to go on or whatever it might be, update that, move the report, you know, delete it, whatever, because it's going to change, right and replace that with the conversation you had don't obviously document the full full thing. But say, conversation with Janet 30 minutes about PD, which is professional development, PD. Now do this for the rest of the week. Regardless of what you had scheduled update with what you actually spent your time on, we're not concerned about five minute window or intervals, 115 minute intervals. If you do a blend of things in that little interval, call IT admin, and just put it in there for 15 minute blocks. That's all we're concerned about. Now do that for the actual time that you're at work for that whole rest of the week. Now, when you get to the end of the week, I want you to bring up that diary that you've accurately updated with everything that's happened. And then next to that, I want you to bring up on the other side, the screenshot of what you had planned and look at the difference between the two. One, I can almost guarantee you, you will be shocked at the fact that your week plan looks dramatically different than what you actually thought you were doing. And two is that what you spent your time on as you're reading the line items might be far more than you thought it was. So for example, if you get dragged into a lot of emergency meetings, or if you meet with a certain stakeholder that you thought you know that you have a bit of my time, I probably spent a couple hours a week with them. And you look back and you've spent six hours that week with them. You're gonna learn something from that there's no hiding from the truth in the diary audit, as I call it. And that's the tool. It's called a diary audit. Whenever I start working with leaders who say they are time poor, I get them to do this exercise. And for many, we would do it for multiple weeks. But the first week is enough. And by two weeks, they can come back to our next coaching session two weeks later, we can go through that diary audit and we can go what is the story that's being told here? Now of that story being told, what are you concerned about? What are you unhappy about? What do you feel like you'd like to be working on but you're not getting to? And then you start working through? Well? How do I eliminate some of these things? What are things that are maybe not the best use of my time, but a stakeholder is chewing up my time by putting it in there. So you'd be looking at strategies to negotiate some of it back. If people are not sticking to meeting timeframes, or they're showing up late and that's making the meeting go long, having a conversation with people about meeting etiquette and agendas becomes really useful. But these are all things that once you understand the micro details of what's happening, you can then start to apply solutions. But most people who are time poor, take really extreme measures they go I'm just gonna block out a whole day and deal with x. It's like yeah, but one that's not sustainable. And two is, chances are you're not gonna be able to disappear for a whole day at a time, in the long term or even that week. So making sure you have some practical strategies and understand the problem that your diary is telling you is far, far more effective. So that's what I've coined the diary audit. It's a really great tool to help you understand where your time is being spent and where you thought it was going to be spent. Make sure your To Do lists are documented in there. So you have a way of capturing and and turning those into actionable items. And then continue to use that practice until you start to get more comfortable with how your time is really being spent, and happier with the results that that's giving you. That's been today's topic on how do I get more time back as a leader and understand where my time is going. As always, you can stay tuned to future episodes to get practical tools, tips and tactics. If you'd like some of our longer form content, great tools that you can download and access, you can head over to our website, Teambuffalo.co/newsletter and subscribe. It's free. All the tools are free and you'll get great information as well as info on our upcoming programs. Thank you for tuning in. I've been your host Travis Thomas and I look forward to seeing you in the next episode. Stay awesome