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From the trenches, senior executives seem to have it easy controlling their schedule. After all, they call many of the meetings others attend, set priorities and determine deadlines.
But when Yue Xhao was promoted at Thumbtack software to overseeing five product teams, she found herself out of control, her calendar dictating every minute of her working hours. She would spend a few minutes every morning stickhandling times when she was double- or triple-booked, apologizing, postponing or seeing if somehow she could handle two situations in sync. Then, she did what her calendar ordered her to. When she became bored in a meeting, she would sneak glances at her email and Slack messages, watching helplessly as her work was piling up.
“I was not spending time on the most impactful work. I was being reactive. My meetings didn’t have the right participants, I wasn’t properly prepared or it was unclear why I was needed. Each meeting spawned more meetings to have follow-up conversations, further booking up my future weeks,” she writes on her blog.
Now an executive coach, she sees others struggling with the same issues of prioritization and calendar management. She shares two major changes she made in her approach to help them regain their footing.
The first step is to list your true priorities so you can organize your meetings around those rather than other people’s needs. She recommends dividing your priorities into three categories: Priorities only you can do, critical priorities you can’t miss and things important to get done.
Then figure out what percentage of your time is spent currently on each category. When you don’t manage your calendar properly, you are likely spending far less time than you should on those first two categories of priorities – particularly the ones only you can do – and non-priorities have slipped into your schedule, probably taking up as much time as those two highest priority categories.
As you develop priorities, start with that second category, critical priorities you can’t miss, rather than the top-tier items only you can do. Aim for five to eight items. If you start with the highest priorities, she argues, everything will inevitably fall into that clump. Instead, siphon off one or two from the more-modest list you develop that truly deserve the highest designation.
Make sure each item is time-bound, with an end date less than six months away, measurable and concrete. As an example, she says this is too vague: “Integrate the newly acquired company.” Instead: “Get executive team buy-in on merged product strategy for current and newly acquired company before third-quarter planning.”
Your lists should only include mission-critical stuff. You should, however, still keep a list of items that are important but won’t get done, at least to keep tabs on them. “Realistically, busy executives don’t have time for tasks that are ‘nice to have’ or ‘would be interesting to try,’” she says.
Then, address your calendar for the future and work toward the ideal. Remove yourself from or delegate meetings where you are not critical. Combine multiple similar conversations on a topic. Shorten meetings from an hour to 15 or 30 minutes. Reduce meetings that recur frequently from weekly to biweekly or even monthly. “Finally, delete… and ask for forgiveness – because you’ll end up asking for it anyway,” she says, when you wind up triple-booked. “They’ll thank you for the advanced notice so they can find alternatives. Get ruthless about making your overall time spent as close to the ideal you just came up with as possible.”
Her second tip is to theme your weeks. Context switching takes up a lot of mental bandwidth, so find an operating cadence throughout the week that you can stick with over time. Arrange your weekly team reviews for Monday afternoon, for example, customer calls Tuesday afternoons, one-on-ones Thursday afternoons and recruiting Friday mornings. Reality may not allow this dream line-up to be perfect but the intent is to try to create themes that allow you to better prepare for meetings and have the right information.
Together, the two tips might help you handle the pressures that come with senior management.
Quick hits
- Leave work before fatigue sets in, advises executive coach Dan Rockwell. Long hours yield diminishing returns. Another habit to adopt at the end of the day: Keep a work notebook at home. If work thoughts pop up, simply write them down. Don’t burden your brain beyond that until you are back at your desk.
- To avoid switching between apps such as iMessage, Google Chat, Slack, Signal and WhatsApp to see if you have messages, blogger Mark Frauenfelder recommends Beeper, a desktop and phone app that combines those platforms and more into a single messaging environment. It’s free for up to six platforms.
- Ottawa thought leader Shane Parrish warns you to keep your distance from folks who have made being wronged their identity. He says they’re not looking for solutions but aiming to recruit.
Harvey Schachter is a Kingston-based writer specializing in management issues. He, along with Sheelagh Whittaker, former CEO of both EDS Canada and Cancom, are the authors of When Harvey Didn’t Meet Sheelagh: Emails on Leadership.