Let’s start with a simple truth for being a manager – you can’t manage a team effectively if you’re not organised yourself. Not only will you be struggling to balance priorities and get things done, but you’ll be setting a bad example for your team as well.
For some managers who struggle with organisation, they can also bring a chaotic energy to the team which over time, isn’t a good thing. There are certainly times when this type of energy can be a good thing but overall, a manager should project calm and collected energy to their team.
If you’re a new manager, this is actually one of the biggest challenges that you’ll face.
This is because when you become a new manager, you often end up doing two jobs at the same time – your new job as a team manager and your own job as a specialist. For example, if you were an SEO Manager at an agency and worked on client projects, those projects usually don’t just disappear when you get promoted to become a manager.
Yes, you may get help and over time, the time that you spend directly on those projects will reduce, but you still need to reorganise your time to account for your new responsibilities, whilst keeping your old ones.
Let’s look at a few ways that you can manage this, whether you’re a new manager or not.
Learn to differentiate between urgent and important tasks
Many of us struggle to tell the difference between a task that is urgent and a task that is important. We tend to think that everything is urgent AND important.
This simply isn’t true.
Once you understand the difference and can apply this to how you prioritise tasks, you are in a far better position to keep control of your time and organisation.
Here are some definitions that should help you.
Urgent: a task that needs immediate attention and action, either by you or someone else.
Important: a task that needs attention but not immediately. The task needs to be looked at, but the end result will be no different if you wait a little while before working on it.
When you are presented with a problem or a task that needs your attention, take a few moments to clarify its urgency. Sometimes, you’ll know the answer immediately but other times, you may need to ask a few questions before you know.
You’ll probably find that most of the time, problems or tasks are important, as opposed to important AND urgent.
Take control of your calendar and time
When you become a manager, your calendar suddenly becomes a LOT busier. You’ll start to do one-on-one meetings, reviews, team meetings etc, along with your regular meetings that you had previously.
Whilst this is part of your job now i.e. working and communicating with your team, you need to do your best to keep control of your time and run these meetings at times that work for you.
When scheduling these meetings, particularly recurring ones, try to do it in such a way that you still have time during the day (or week) for keeping on top of your regular workload.
For example, I like to structure my time so that any meetings and calls are packed closely together like this:
This may look scary to some, but for me, this works perfectly because I can use all of my mental energy and be present on these calls effectively. Then after these calls are done, I can turn my focus to my tasks that require me to be head down and focused.
The same was true when I managed a large team, I would do my best to put meetings close together and whilst this isn’t always possible, especially when you manage people across different timezones, I was still able to keep control of my calendar overall.
I was also very, very protective of my calendar in terms of allowing people to book time. I was always available to my team, but I would also block out chunks of time where I would automatically reject any meeting requests:
My team could see this in my calendar and knew that this was a time when I needed to focus on my own tasks and priorities. Occasionally, someone may ask for my time during this period and if it was urgent, I would help. But this was very rare.
It also sets the right example for your team that this deep and focused work time is important, so they would also do this when they felt that they needed no meetings time.
Some teams (and whole companies) will also try things like “no meeting Wednesdays” etc, which could also be worth a try if you generally struggle with your volume of meetings.
Have a system for managing email, messages and tasks
It baffles me how many managers and leaders don’t have any kind of system or process for keeping control of their email and tasks.
Given the type of work that we do, email alone has the ability to make you feel like you’re not in control of your time or priorities. We live in an “always on” world where things are competing for our attention 24/7.
Add to this the rise of chat tools such as Slack and Teams over the last few years, then we have a huge number of messages that hit us throughout the day, making it hard to find time to focus on actual work and tasks.
I’d highly recommend systems such as inbox=0 and getting things done that both enable you to take control of tasks and “stuff” that gets thrown at us every day.
But it doesn’t really matter if you use these systems. What matters is that you use some system.
Ensure that you set boundaries and can switch off from work
The final part of this topic that I want to talk about is one of the most important but again, overlooked – switching your mind off from work.
It may sound counterintuitive – the idea that NOT doing work enables you to be more productive. But the truth is that we all only have so much mental energy that we can use each day. Once that energy is depleted, we can continue working but the outputs aren’t going to be of the same quality as when your mind is fresh.
In order to come in the following day with fresh energy, you need to recharge your brain and this can only happen if you switch off from work.
As a result, I’m a huge advocate for having a routine at the end of your working day that signals to your brain that work is over and personal time has begun. I’ve written about shutdown routines before here, so I’d recommend taking a look and seeing how you can apply these principles to your own day.
I’ve also shared my own routine which hasn’t changed much over the years:
If you can keep all of these principles in mind when you manage your team, you’ll be much more likely to find the right balance to support your team fully whilst remaining effective and organised with other important tasks and projects.
