For all of us, time is the most valuable asset. In an organisation, where the leaders spend time signals the priorities, shapes culture and determines whether the organisation executes on what truly matters. Great time management, I have found, isn’t about squeezing more tasks into a day; it’s about aligning your time with critical outcomes and creating leverage through people, processes and decisions. Those who are good at this make the hour last longer.

Why is time management key?

It converts strategy to action. Your calendar is the operating system of strategy. If this calendar doesn’t reflect the company’s priorities, the organisation isn’t likely to achieve its goals.

It frees time for what matters. Leaders create impact less by doing and more by enabling. Ensuring time availability for the right activities multiplies output.

It improves decisions. Unrushed thinking and focused reviews improve judgement, reduce rework and prevent “urgent” fires.

It is the signal for direction and culture. Teams copy leaders’ calendar management style. When the leader models deep work, prioritisation, preparation and learning, others in the team follow.

What are the common obstacles?

Tyranny of the urgent: Unplanned demands, whatsapp pings and what gets classified as “urgent” crowds out important work.

Meeting creep: Meetings accumulate without a clear purpose or decision rights

Ambiguous priorities: Undefined, unprioritized goals produce reactive calendars where everything feels equally important.

Delegation gaps: Work gravitates upward when role clarity or trust is low; leaders become doers, choking bandwidth

Context switching: Too much activity especially in different contexts leads to poor focus; 60 minutes of activity is then only 10 minutes of progress.

Saying “yes”: Without guardrails, leaders accept more than their calendar can bear.

What’s the fix?

Define the focus. Translate strategy into key quarterly outcomes. If an activity doesn’t advance these, it’s a candidate to decline, delegate or delay.

Design your ideal week. Time-block for people, performance, thinking and certainly for buffers

Run meetings like decisions, not rituals. Ask for a pre-read with the question to be decided, options, data and recommended next steps. Start with the decision, then discussion. End with the owner, deadline and success metric.

Schedule Important/Non-Urgent work first each week. Deal with urgent/important issues and define what “urgent” means with your team.

Delegate for outcomes, not tasks.

Reduce context switching. Batch similar work so you don’t have fragmented focus. Silence notifications during deep work.

Install guardrails for what you say “yes” to

Audit and iterate. Review your calendar monthly: What created impact? What can be eliminated? Your calendar tells a very important story. Read it.

As someone said, “When you invest your time in what truly matters, balance follows and happiness becomes the dividend”