Most people at work should have some kinds of job description telling them what they should be doing during the working hours. Whether on the service front-line, in the administration back office or any other functional offices, on the production line, or even working from home for today’s knowledge workers, their roles of responsibility should be clearly defined enough in order to determine what they are supposed to be delivering and how they should be spending their times accordingly.
How business leaders should spend their time may be less clearly specified. Though they should have their Key Result Areas to be accountable for, the higher up in the corporate hierarchy, usually the less specific will be the job descriptions. No one will be telling the head of a company on exactly how he should be spending his time, despite his secretary’s assistance in scheduling appointments and meetings for him. Indeed people may often be wondering what their bosses actually do and why do they seem to be busy all the time.
Indeed time reserved for critical thinking is vital not only for business leaders but anyone who is keen to take destiny into his own hands
In terms of physical activities, no doubt they are primarily occupied themselves with meetings and dialogues in various forms, including communications on the phones and via emails. The useful question for a business leader to ask is how to prioritize his time among these engagements of daily activities.
For a start, a business leader should not plan or attend any meetings simply for the sake of routines or obligation—or fixing any appointments really just for the sake of courtesy—but make sure any engagement which takes up his time should be somehow relevant, better yet, contributing to achieving his Key Result Areas in one way or another.
He should understand that time is the most precious kind of resources to be managed—since every single elapsed moment is gone forever. As with money, a distinction should be drawn between what needs to be spent and what should be invested for the future. Generally speaking, the former may refer to the time required to attend to the various meetings and appointments his secretary or assistant schedules for him on his diary—no doubt at his behest or upon his approval—while the latter are those quality moments when he should be focusing on planning things ahead.
Of course planning is usually a collective process and will have to involve communicating with other people in one way or another, therefore, may only lead to more meetings to be scheduled on the diary. So truly quality moments for a business leader should be the time reserved for his critical thinking in solitude, everyday, during which he should be pondering on the effectiveness of his own time management. Besides other matters of prime concern, he should be constantly assessing the situation of his company, whether things are on track and if it is delivering results as expected; and if not, what are the reasons and what to do about it. He also needs to take time to consciously review and digest the information he has taken in during all those meetings and dialogues he has been engaged in, thereby forming perspectives and shaping decisions for the business and himself.
