When you first become a manager, it’s often after being promoted from a role where you’re some kind of specialist or an individual contributor. For example, you may be an SEO or Digital PR Consultant prior to being promoted to a manager. When you’re an individual contributor, especially a senior one, you usually have your own projects or clients to focus on.
At digital agencies, you probably have at least 4-5 clients that you own, along with a few more where you help colleagues.
At brands, you probably have 3-5 projects that you are accountable for as an individual contributor.
Wherever you sit, it’s a hard transition when you become a manager because these clients and projects don’t suddenly disappear when you get promoted.
As a result, you’re faced with a situation where you’re having to learn to become a manager whilst still having to do your “old” job.
Over time, with some agencies and brands, your client and project work may be reduced. But even if this happens, it’s still likely that at least some of your time will need to be spent on these areas.
So even if you’re not a new manager, you’ll still need to balance your time between:
- Day-to-day management of your team and their work.
- Working on your own client or project deliverables.
Let’s look at how you can strike this balance.
Embrace a to-do list system
At the most basic level, you need some kind of system to manage your projects and tasks. If you don’t have this, then everything else will become much, much harder.
Not having a proper to-do list system means that you will do one or both of the following:
- You’ll keep tasks in your head – never a good idea because whilst our brains are generally pretty great, they’re terrible at sorting between lots of tasks at the same time.
- You’ll use your email as a to-do list – a terrible idea as well because this means that you’re basically giving control over your to-do list to anyone who has your email address. The same applies to messaging platforms such as Slack or Teams.
The consequence here is that you simply don’t get things done and will never feel in control of your to-do list and priorities.
Not only is this a terrible example to set for your team, but it means that you’ll just focus on whatever task, client or project is shouting loudest for your attention at any given moment.
You don’t need to use anything fancy for this either. Some of the most effective people I’ve worked with use just a notepad and pen. Personally, I use Todoist which is a simple task management tool.
Whatever you use, the key is that you trust it and use it consistently.
If you’re new to this whole area, I’d recommend getting started with Getting Things Done. If you’re not a big book reader, you can watch this short video which will give you the basics.
Set your to-do list the day before
This is such a powerful tip.
Honestly.
I’ve taught this to many people over the years and some of them still mention it to me many years later as a game changer for their headspace and productivity.
It’s pretty simple – when you finish work for the day, take the last few minutes to do the following:
- Review your to-do list for the day and tick off what you did.
- Make your to-do list for the following day.
- Close your laptop and go home.
That’s it. When you come into work the following day, you get going on your to-do list and don’t end up procrastinating for an hour figuring out what your priorities are for the day.
Give yourself a fighting chance
Leading on from this, you need to be realistic about what you can actually accomplish each day. As a manager, you’re going to have lots of things that fight for your attention each day and lots of times when you get pulled into a project by a team member.
Try to take account of this when writing your to-do list and give yourself a fighting chance of getting things done.
For example, if you have a seven hour day and you already have three hours of meetings, it’s unlikely that you’ll get through five hours worth of tasks. Especially if you include unexpected tasks or meetings.
It’s pretty disheartening to look at your to-do list at the end of the day and see that you only got one or two things done.
Give yourself a fighting chance and be realistic about what you can get done.
Draw boundaries with your team
As a manager, you always want to be there for your team and be as supportive as possible. If they need help, you want to be able to help them.
But… there needs to be a balance between being there for your team and having space to focus on your own tasks.
If you don’t strike this balance, your team won’t understand that there are times when you aren’t available for them and will expect you to drop everything to help them every time they need something.
You can draw boundaries by:
- Blocking out time in your calendar for your own work – you can tell your team that you’re doing this and they can see it in your calendar. Tell them that unless something is urgent, you’ll check in with them after this time.
- Asking if something needs your immediate attention – quite often when someone wants your help, you don’t need it right away. Instead of giving them help immediately, ask if it can wait for an hour, a few hours or even until the following day. Sometimes, it can’t. But I’d bet that most of the time, it can.
- Being open about having to balance your own workload as an individual contributor vs. your workload as a supportive manager.
A lack of boundaries is not only damaging for your own productivity, but it teaches your team to be reliant on you for everything which will also be damaging for their development and progression.
Understand deep work vs. shallow work
If you’re unfamiliar with the concept, then I’d recommend starting with this short video where I share the differences between deep work and shallow work.
For the purposes of this post, the core point is that as a manager who also needs to find time for your own client or project work, you need to carve out time for deep work. This involves you understanding the attributes that enable you to get into a flow and state for deep work to happen.
This includes things such as your environment, your schedule and things that may otherwise get in the way of you being able to focus for a prolonged period of time.
Once you understand what these attributes are for you, you can communicate them to your team which will help them respect the time that you take to focus on a big task or piece of work.
As we’ve discussed, making the transition from an individual contributor to a team manager can be tricky at the best of times. But it’s even harder when you still need to do your “old” job and this is something that you’re just expected to do.
If you follow at least a few of the steps above, you’ll be in a much healthier position to thrive as a manager whilst being able to deliver your day-to-day client or project work.
