How to Manage Time? Manage Yourself Instead.

I'm often asked for tips on how to better manage time.

You can't manage time. What you can manage is yourself. I find that, to do that, you need to keep asking yourself two simple questions:

1. What do I want/need to accomplish?
2. What can I do that has the most LEVERAGE on my time to help me get there?

Do that.

It's surprising to me how few people actually go through this simple loop and do so consistently. I can't claim to do a great job of it myself yet, but I can't dispute its efficacy. The more you do it, the better you get.

The operative word here is leverage. You don't need more time (also, you can't have it). What you need is better leverage. Archimedes said,

"Give me a lever long enough and a fulcrum on which to place it, and I shall move the world."

Smart man. To be a mathematician, physicist, engineer, inventor, and astronomer, all at once, he had to be. We should listen and learn.

Here are a couple of examples of leverage you can (and, frankly, should) exploit as a leader:

• Spend more time with your highest potential people. Help them double down on their strengths, share as much context with them as you possibly can, and be crystal clear on what needs to be accomplished. Coach them to do the same themselves with their people and bring them closer together as peers. By cascading this mindset, your time is leveraged in a way you could never be by trying to work with everyone equally.
• Spend more time improving your hiring process. Who are you hiring? Why? How do you assess for that? How do you help others do so? Great hiring has obvious leverage: the better your team (and culture), the easier everything becomes, and those benefits compound over and over. Turn that flywheel as hard as you can.
• Spend more time crowdsourcing ideas and designing a Learning & Development plan for your team. This is a one-time effort (with tiny incremental improvements over time) that is leveraged over every individual enrolled, and multiplied by how much better each one gets. The benefits can be nothing short of mind-blowing.

So, again: What do you need to do? And what gives you the biggest leverage to do it?

Do that.