Set your own schedule

Time-poverty is an unfortunate theme of life as a modern manager. The importance of setting your own schedule cannot be underestimated.

So, time management needs to be a focus early on, before your calendar starts to fill up by meeting invites, which is an inevitable occurrence for the majority of managers due to the ever-increasing scope of their work, as well as their overall workload.

There is no magic formula or silver bullet to setting your own schedule and keeping to it effectively. But there are actions and habits that can help you to reserve valuable time to your most important tasks. These are highly subjective, and the following suggestions are based on observations from effective managers and my own experience, in a number of different cultural settings.

If you are a Project Manager, begin by finding out the schedule of the project management office (PMO) or project board meetings. If you are joining an existing project, find out what project meetings there are, how often they take place, and whether they're really suitable for every attendee. If anything looks wrong, then your arrival and fresh perspective is the perfect opportunity to change to a better schedule for everyone involved.

Once you have established these mandatory and necessary recurring meetings, plan how much time you need to prepare for them. Block out this preparation time in your calendar immediately before the meetings themselves, so that it can be dedicated to doing this preparation. If you can do the preparation well ahead of the meeting, then great.

If not, this is the last chance you will have to do it, and you really don't want that time to be taken away by something else.

If you are a Team Manager, establish the working patterns of your team and design how it needs to be going forward. For example, are there daily huddles or shift handovers? If so, at what time? Is there a better, more appropriate time instead?

From experience, I've found that publishing your team's regular meetings, such as the daily huddles, on collaboration platforms such as SharePoint is a great way to safeguard that time for your team members. Bear in mind that each of them may well be working on different projects. Publishing your development team's huddles as a significant event cuts across all projects becomes regarded as a standard that's valuable for every project, because that's when important development information is shared between projects among your team.

For regular one-to-ones with your team members, make sure you allow sufficient time for each person. Again, try not to schedule them immediately next to each other because there is always the possibility of overrunning.

Due to the potentially sensitive and private nature of the discussions, you should allow the conversation to continue as much as possible by planning in a contingency.

For team meetings, I find that monthly or four-weekly intervals work best. This allows sufficient time for actions and is a reasonable period for genuine newsworthy events to occur, which can then be shared among the team. Team meetings are overly frequent if the same update is given on the same topic, repeatedly.