The Main Time Thieves

In leadership, effective time management is one of the hardest skills to master. Few executives I work with fail to express their frustration about feeling overwhelmed by tasks and the seeming impossibility of finding room in their schedule for all their commitments. Not to mention the nostalgia—and at times, guilt—for not achieving a healthy balance between work and other areas of life.

Is this an inevitable and intrinsic aspect of every leader’s life? It doesn’t have to be. Throughout my career, I’ve also met true masters in the art of gaining time. The difference often lies in everyday work habits that, without us realizing, become dangerous leaks of time. Identifying and managing them is key. Here are some of the most common ones:

1. Firefighting mode: Tackling each day by putting out fires and reacting to crises is a poor use of our vital energy—and one with addictive effects. Developing habits of proactivity and scenario planning helps us anticipate problems, reduce surprises, and limit emergencies, leading to a calmer daily rhythm and better prioritization.
2. Using our peak energy for what we enjoy most: We often spend our highest-energy hours on tasks we enjoy, leaving the more tedious ones for when we’re tired. That increases the likelihood of procrastination, as we keep postponing them like kicking a can down the road.
3. Holding on to tasks we should delegate: When we don’t invest time in training and developing our team, we end up doing operational tasks we should have already delegated. As a result, our days are overcrowded with tasks we shouldn’t be handling, while the truly strategic matters go unattended.
4. Perfectionism turned into micromanagement: When an obsession with quality morphs into distrust and micromanagement, it discourages the team and creates fear around taking initiative or making decisions. This often leads to the dangerous practice of reverse delegation, where employees bring back to our plate issues they should be handling on their own.
5. Open-door policy… without boundaries: Confusing an open-door policy with full-time availability for interruptions can be a major time thief. Every team has people who make 20 inquiries a day that could easily be consolidated into one discussion block, if clear boundaries were in place.
6. Scattered to-do lists and sticky notes: A disorganized task list and hundreds of sticky notes are no substitute for a structured calendar. If tasks aren’t scheduled with time blocks to complete them, there’s no realistic way to gauge what’s achievable in a single workday.
7. Endless alerts and notifications: The constant stream of notifications from our phones, tablets, and computers drains our attention and fragments our focus. When we add up these interruptions throughout the day, we’d be surprised at how much time and energy they steal from us.

And these are just a few examples. How about taking a moment this week to identify which of your everyday habits have become enemies of your time? More importantly, what immediate and concrete actions can you take to start managing them better?