Time allocation: the long and short of it

I was with a group of Northern Colorado leaders recently and the subject of work-life balance came up. One of the leaders remarked about all of the leaders he knows that take time, religiously, to maintain their daily bike rides, runs and other leisure and fitness pursuits. His question was, what kind of jobs do these people have? How do they do it?

It’s a fact: We can’t stop, nor create, more time. An effective leader is aware that time is a finite, non-renewable resource that must be carefully managed. A panicky leader will try to squeeze time in his grasp to keep it from slipping away. The symptoms are familiar to us all: days jammed with schedules, meetings with rigid agendas and jealously guarded access to unscheduled time. The panicked leader’s constant anxiety is how to do too much work in not enough time.

Typically, short-term time frames, on the whole, will always be felt more urgently. Long-term time frames will usually be more important. Some things need to be done yesterday, while many important things require the unfolding of processes that take time. Depending on the exact nature of your sales cycle, and your ordering and shipment times, short-term and long-term will have different meanings. Decide for yourself what your windows are for each. Is your short term from now until tomorrow, or until two weeks from now? What are your long-term time frames?

We all are directed by quarterly and annual goals. Does your planning extend beyond that time? Do you work from time-to-time on your five-year plan? This is basically how you frame your time for work, doing the tasks that lead you toward achieving. Over both the short and long term, there are major and minor tasks and activities you must perform. Whether they are major or minor is closely related to the nature of the goals they are directed toward attaining.

One way to simplify organizing and prioritizing your tasks and activities is to reduce “work clutter.” There are many activities that clutter our days, robbing us of time. Some are interruptions from outside: phone calls, drop-in visitors and pop-up crises. You probably have a few personal time wasters: not saying no, refusing to delegate, or having a messy work area. Then there are some time wasters that are just part of the job, such as reading work-related material, business travel and meetings.

An easy-to-understand, challenging concept to be more mindful about how we choose to invest our time can be seen in what is called Paytime vs. No-Paytime. Quite simply, Paytime activities are all of the things we choose to do that have top-line revenue and bottom-line profit impact on our businesses. No-Paytime activities are the opposite. While they are often required, all too many leaders end up spending too much time on activities that don’t drive the business forward and could be delegated to a less highly compensated employee. A great question for a leader to ask himself or herself is: “Am I the only one that can complete this task?” If the answer is yes, you may have to do it. If no, delegate it.

In this example, Marty, a vice president for sales, is faced with the task of completing a sales compensation analysis project. He also has been asked by one of his steady-producer sales reps to go on an important sales call to a new prospect. Feeling the pressure of the deadline to get the compensation plan off his desk, he makes a tactical error and sends the salesperson off to make the call solo, and ultimately the business is not won. If Marty would have been more mindful of Paytime, he would have gone on the sale call and completed the compensation task in non-prime revenue-generating hours, perhaps before 8 or 9 a.m. or after 5 p/m.

In general, there are no hard and fast, right or wrong answers here. What is important is the thinking going on that invites you, as a leader, to make more strategic choices on how you choose to invest your time.

Bob Bolak is president of Sandler Training. Contact him at 303-579-1939 or bbolak@sandler.com.

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