Two Strategies To Manage Your Worktime

Hi there and welcome. It’s Kerstin Jatho here from 4Seeds Consulting, a transformational coach who shifts people from languishing to flourishing. Today, I want to talk to you about two strategies on time management.

In a previous video, I spoke about time management and specifically about Kairos and Chronos time, clock, and calendar time. Today, I really want to talk about the three types of time that you have at work. I mean, time is fluid. It’s like a sand glass, it runs and runs. You can’t stop it, and you never have enough of it. I don’t know anybody who actually says, “I’ve got too much time. I don’t know what to do.” Quite the contrary; everybody’s under pressure. Time is the topic. We try to squeeze a millisecond out of every day, optimising every moment of the day.

But in a work environment, have you ever noticed that you actually have three types of time? The one is leader time, which means the time that your line manager demands from you, and that is time you don’t have much control over.

Two strategies to manage your worktime

Strategy 1

The first one is subordinate time. Subordinate time is time where you spend time with your subordinates planning, scheduling, and assisting them. But a big component of that is actually growing and mentoring them. And that is the part where leaders often go, “I don’t have time for that. When I do have the time, I’ll get to that part.” So that is an underlying of time, we would like to introduce.

Strategy 2

And the second one is self-reflection time, which is paramount in you sitting back, reflecting, and making decisions. So, the subordinate and the self-reflection time are the two that are always scarce. The two that you are always chasing.

So, the question is, do you have time? Or does time have you? And to change these two components, which will have a significant impact on you as well as your team, is to start to introduce learning and development with your team. So, learning to mentor them and to coach them so that they are able to make decisions more and more on their own and that they don’t always have to run to you. Otherwise, it creates one huge bottleneck if all decisions have to be signed off and approved by you.

And you will never have enough time. But the minute you let go and start mentoring your team, you will start to have time.

To start the process is really to look at projects that you can hand to the team and to start mentoring them. Not giving them the answers, not giving them the solutions, and encouraging people to think through it, to really come to you and say, “This is the challenge, and this is the solution that I have come up with.” Allow your team and invite them to do more and more of the thinking.

Yes, some of their ideas will not be right. And some of the ideas will not be the perfect solution. But how will they know if they don’t ever try? And for you, the mentoring comes in to guide that process because it also helps you to understand which part of this are they understanding, and where are they grappling?

You can dovetail to your learning accordingly. Don’t take it away from your employees. It’s exceptionally disempowering and does not grow them. Over and above, you’re going to carry on creating that bottleneck of continuously having people come to you, which, yes, makes you a very important person, because you keep on making decisions, but it might, in the end, be very career limiting for you because you are not growing. You are not spending time on your own growth and development. And it could be that somebody actually takes that career advancement position that you’ve had your eye on for a long time. So, putting in time to develop yourself and your team and reflect is absolutely critical.

Over to you for sharing your comments and experiences.

Which of the three times do you spend the most time in?