How should you as a leader structure your day, and what do you do with your difficult tasks?
For the typical frontline leader and many managers, a big chunk of their day is spent in reaction mode.
How would you plan your day out so that you could still leave time to be reactive and responsive to your team, and still achieve some of the important things that you have to focus on? Use these tips:
How would you plan your day so you can leave time to be reactive and responsive to your team, and still achieve some of the important things you have to focus on? Use these tips: Click To TweetSeparate Your Day
Think of your day as being in three different chunks. There is the beginning of your day when your work group and team are just getting underway in their production, there is the middle of your day when you might have a little bit more freedom to work on things and attend meetings, and then there is the end of the day.
Often, at the beginning of the day, you are focused on making sure you have the right people assigned to the right jobs, everyone understands what is needed, and that they have the resources that they need to be successful.
The middle of the day might give you the more creative time when you can work on problems and projects and things that will help advance your team’s performance but might require you to interact with other departments within the company.
And then the end of the day is often where you are wrapping things up. You might be acknowledging the performance of your team that day and taking care of any loose ends that will help hand off the shift to the next leader.
When you look at your beginning, middle, and end of the day, you can still leave room for reaction mode and things that will come up unexpectedly.
Do Not Procrastinate Difficult Tasks
The next dilemma facing many front-line leaders is what to do with the task that you would tend to procrastinate because it is difficult.
There is a concept called eat your frog first, which sounds kind of disgusting, and it is meant to be. It says that if you have got a difficult conversation or difficult problem that you need to solve, do not leave it until the end of the day, because it will emotionally drain you. Instead, decide that you are going to tackle that very early in your day and take care of it so that you can enjoy the rest of your day.
Once you have mastered a few principles of time management and priority management, you might decide that you need to work on some of your other leadership skills. And of course, that is where we come in with our Front Line Leadership Program.
We want to be your resource for frontline leadership excellence.
