Why time management tools aren't freeing your time

Time Management is Challenging

A frequent mistake that entrepreneurs make is believing they must do everything. There is a sense that no one else may be trusted fully to deliver on time and to the quality required, especially in the early stages of a startup when you’re proving yourself.

The standard solution is better time management. If email and admin are weighing you down then set aside a prescribed time each day to address them, while blocking time for more important work. Nir Eyal makes a career from teaching how to do this.

The average owner reports only 1.5 hours a day of uninterrupted and highly productive time. You may have tried time-blocking but it might not work, because demand for your time never stops. Why is this happening?

Working In Your Business vs Working On It

Before you dive into creating additional administrative tasks, consider whether there a deeper issue at work. Have you created an environment where people feel trusted to finish tasks on their own?

To scale a business you must learn to focus on what you do best and how to fully delegate to people. The longer you spend working in your business the harder you may find this to do.

Founders spend two thirds of their time working in their business and one third working on it. The latter means doing the important and strategic tasks that generate growth.

The primary distractions are email and administration, which take up more than half of the time compared with a quarter working with employees and a fifth spent with customers.

Particular pain points include unscheduled communications, waiting for information and dealing with personality issues. Most business owners say they spend the most time on email, while only 9% believe it is of primary importance.

Three-quarters of founders surveyed say they want to spend more time doing tasks that are both urgent and important, two-thirds want employees to be accountable for outcomes, and over half wish to offload admin.

The tasks most founders prefer to do are sales and marketing, strategic planning, product development and working on partnerships.

But there is a roadblock to being more strategic.

Perception is Reality

The issue everyone faces is how to be clear, which doesn’t get easier because you became a leader. This is harder than we think because people do not download what we say, but create a perception of what we want based on how they see us. The less open we are, the more this perception is created by our audience filling in the blanks.

Studies of co-habiting students show that it takes nine months of living at close quarters for one person’s perceptions to start to align with those of their roommate, i.e. for them to see you as you see yourself. Even then, the correlation between their view and yours is <0.5, when 1.0 is a perfect overlap.

How to Create Agency

There are three things you can do to improve your chances of being understood.

• Map the journey

• Ask for feedback

• Document processes.

The first is to map the journey that delivers your vision. Too often leaders repeat the outcomes they expect without creating a roadmap for how to get there. The longer the time it takes to achieve a goal, the greater the doubts and uncertainties in people’s minds.

Incentives for completing long-term projects rarely work until close to the end and motivation is required earlier in the process. This is strongest when people know what is expected and feel trusted to do it.

The next step is to solicit feedback and act on it. Ask people how you are performing as a manager and a leader and where they require more guidance. Doing this in a survey may overcome fears about being too honest with the boss face-to-face.

The third stage is to document how you work. This may be in writing or video. Sam Corcos of Levels insists on both in his business and considers it essential to create team spirit and in freeing his time for critical tasks. He shares Levels practices on Notion.

A Simple Exercise to Build Understanding

Here’s an exercise for you and your team. Each of these statements corresponds to a dominant coping mechanism, meaning our emotional default response when we are asked to change or do something new.

• It’s important to be organised and efficient

• It’s important to be aware of the feelings of others

• It’s important to be sure of the facts and figures

• It’s important to be open-minded and try new things

Write down how you think each member of your team will rank these statements in order of importance and ask them to rank them. Have each person do the same for your beliefs. Then compare the two sets of answers to show how well you understand each other.

I have a Google Sheet that makes this easy to do. Reply to this email if you’d like to use it.

The Importance of Changing Perceptions

Business leaders say time management is their biggest challenge. Consequently there are many solutions available for how to address this and time blocking is among the most popular.

The problem, however, may not be how you use your time but whether you enable agency in your team to use their time productively. To do this requires less focus on what you do and more on how you are perceived.

I'm Simon Maughan and I write The Profit Elevator as a guide for smaller businesses to accelerate growth.

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