The counter-intuitive logic of protecting your time.
Edition 16 of Forward+
1 big idea worth considering.
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.
If you had a meeting with your boss, or a meeting with the board, or a meeting with an important customer, that time would be protected.
If it was an hour long meeting, your attention would be there for all 60 minutes. Not on Slack. Not on email. Not responding to pop-up questions from team members.
Why?
Because giving your full attention is how you show your boss, board, or customer that you value their time.
Yet when it comes to making sales calls? Or moving a project forward? Or studying the industry to grow your expertise? Or practicing a pitch?
That’s the real work - the work that moves the needle for the business. And it’s also the work that we’re much more likely to set aside for the next most pressing distraction.
This is the work that we don’t give our full attention to. We’re willing to allow distractions to pull us away from it in a way that we aren’t willing to for a meeting with our boss, board, or customer.
We don’t protect our time for moving the project forward or making sales calls, because we don’t get the dopamine hit of helping a colleague with their question or concern that could have waited. So we choose the distraction instead of the work. The reward for dedicated focus on the inputs doesn’t come until some unknown point in the future, so we take the immediate reward of the hyperactive hive mind over the delayed reward of the work.
But by protecting our time for the real work, not the reactive work, we set a precedent for ourselves and our team that protecting our time matters. It matters because that’s the only way that we protect the work that needs to be done to move the business forward.
It’s counter-intuitive because in the moment it feels like we’re ignoring the business, but in reality we’re investing in it. We’re putting first things first, and settling second things second as time allows. Not the other way around.
Protect your time and you protect your business.
2 questions worth asking.
Good questions are the root of good coaching, because inquiry has the power to spark ideas and uncover gold that lies just beneath the surface. Each week on Forward+ I share 2 questions that you can use with yourself, at work, or in your relationships.
Question 1: Do I protect my time?
Cultural norms are a byproduct of the standards that leaders set. If you want your team to protect their time for the most important work, we have to start by modeling that ourselves.
Question 2: Does my team feel empowered to protect their time?
What they see, they will repeat. Be clear about what the most important work is, and be clear with your team that their task is to protect the time needed for that work.
3 links worth exploring.
📚 How we spend our days is how we spend our lives. (The Marginalian)
💡 Pinpoint your 20% high-impact tasks. (Justin Welsh)
🎧 The pursuit of meaning and the life-changing power of choosing your attitude. (Seth Godin on The Tim Ferriss Show)
That’s a wrap for this week’s edition of Forward+.
💡 Have an idea for a future edition or an interesting link worth sharing? Just reply to this email! I’d love to hear from you.
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