The counter-intuitive logic of protecting your time.

Edition 16 of Forward+

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1 big idea worth considering.

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When you’re leading a team, it can feel like 100 different people are vying for your attention on 100 different topics at any given moment.

As leaders, we feel pressure to tend to all of these different people and topics because it seems pressing in the moment, and that’s how we show that we take our work and our colleagues seriously - by being involved in an endless stream of unplanned conversations and fires. We’re just putting the business first…right?

But as leaders, we also know what’s on the other side of this.

A lot of “work” and movement, but little clarity on if we’re working on the right things, and how our work is leading to real results. More ad hoc than strategic. More friction than momentum. More stress than focus.

The solution to this problem is doing what feels unnatural in the moment - protecting your time and modeling to the team that our time is valuable and should be focused on the most important work, not what feels most pressing in the moment.