Usually, though that’s a tiny number of issues, so time saved anyway on all the pesky things that didn’t matter. To deal with urgent and important matters on an urgent basis is actually fine. Time and agony spared.Ī third option is that the issue truly couldn’t wait, and so you dealt with it when it had to be dealt with. Often, in a three minute conversation during your weekly on a Thursday, you can resolve what might have taken 10 back-and-forth emails between Monday and Wednesday. What felt urgent on Tuesday was actually completely unimportant or got resolved by other means. The question or issue will have disappeared. Three things will happen by the time your Thursday meeting rolls around: Train the people around you to save as many questions as humanly possible until your weekly meeting or bi-weekly meeting with them. When people save their questions for later, everyone saves time.

So here’s what you do: just tell people to save their questions. Most of those questions come from the people with whom you work most closely: either people to whom you report or people who report to you. How many times in your day do you get interrupted by people with pesky questions that honestly aren’t that important or that urgent? Let me guess.all the time. Constant interruptions with pesky questionsĬan you tell how I really feel by how I titled this section of the post? If you can't manage your time, you'll never effectively manage your life or your leadership. If you’re tired of being stuck, if you’re tired of being semi-effective at work but leaving so much potential under-utilized, if you don’t want to spend 2017 never being off when you’re supposed to be off and sacrificing your family once again, I’d love for you to check out The High Impact Leader course.Īnd in the hopes of helping you while you in the meantime, here are 5 hidden time stealers you can eliminate starting today. And of course, they’re free.īut I also want to invite you into a deeper journey. In this post, I want to share 5 time stealers I’ve learned to reduce or eliminate from my life. The enemy of many leaders and their mission is time stealing bad practices that seem to suck up massive volumes of available time.Īnd if you can’t manage your time, you’ll never effectively manage your life or your leadership. What actually did happen today? Great question. Productivity must be easier to measure if you work at, say, Starbucks or Walmart, where you’re dealing with tangibles (how many lattes did you make in the last hour…how many customers did you check out?).īut in the world of ministry or office work, it’s a whole different story.

Or more accurately, wondered where your productivity went. How many times have you gotten to the end of a day only to wonder where all the time went?

The Time Stealers by Glynne MacLean