Effective leadership depends on one very crucial skill: time management. As a leader, your ability to prioritise tasks and allocate time can make or break the organisation or team’s success. When you master time management, you not only bring about an improvement in your productivity but also inspire those around you. In this fast-paced business world, juggling various responsibilities can become overwhelming. However, with the right approach, you can regain control of your schedule and focus on what actually matters.
Ajay Srinivasan, who happens to be a well-known Indian business leader who built businesses in the financial services space in India and abroad and was the former CEO of Aditya Birla Capital, focused a lot on the importance of time management in leadership. So, here, in our blog, we are going to talk about the various challenges that you might face while managing time. We will also talk about Ajay Srinivasan‘s perspective on how time management in leadership can bring about extraordinary improvement to outcomes and the work environment.
The need to manage life effectively
Managing time effectively can definitely feel like trying to juggle too many balls at once. It is not just about staying busy; it is more about staying focused and productive while avoiding pitfalls. Ajay Srinivasan, the former CEO of Aditya Birla Capital and a veteran business leader, has recently shared his perspective on the need to manage time effectively through a blog. He has mentioned that one can only be called a true leader if he/she comes with the ability to manage time effectively. Effective time management helps companies achieve business goals and reach new heights by boosting productivity, improving efficiency, and reducing stress through focused work, smart planning, and task delegation.
Common challenges associated with effective time management
Here are some of the common challenges associated with time management:
- Multitasking and over commitment:
Taking on more than you can actually manage can seem like a sign of ambition. However, it may lead to exhaustion and frustration. Multitasking can divide your attention and reduce the quality of the task. It can also bring about unnecessary stress in your life.
- Dealing with distractions:
Distraction can become the biggest challenge to time management. It can easily break focus and force you to spend significant time getting back on track. Small distractions daily can take away significant chunks of your day.
- Managing unexpected interruptions:
No matter how well you plan your day, unexpected interruptions are bound to happen. Whether it is a last-minute work request or a sudden change in business requirements, these interruptions can disrupt your flow and can feel like roadblocks. They can also impact your deadlines.
Here are some of the other challenges that Ajay Srinivasan has spoken of:
- Tyranny of the urgent: Unplanned demands and WhatsApp pings gets classified as “urgent” and crowds out important work.
- Meeting creep: Meetings accumulate without a clear purpose or decision rights. This can cause you to waste significant time on a daily basis.
- 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.
How to get rid of these challenges?
Now, let us take a quick look at some of the ways to overcome the challenges associated with effective time management:
- Set clear goals: Define clear objectives for your day, week, or month. Clear goals can provide you with direction. It also makes it easier for you to prioritise tasks.
- Prioritise your tasks: Use a system to categorise tasks based on their urgency or importance and work accordingly.
- Delegate responsibilities: Try to assign tasks to the team members based on their strengths. Effective delegation can free up time for more crucial duties and empower your team.
- Limit distractions: Identify the sources of distractions in your environment and consider methods such as turning off notifications or creating quiet workspaces. This will help you get your job done easily.
Ajay Srinivasan has also talked about some other ways in which you can manage time effectively:
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. That way, you can design your week effectively.
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 the 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.
Reduce context switching. Batch similar work so you don’t have fragmented focus. Silence notifications during deep work.
Audit and iterate. Review your calendar monthly: What created impact? What can be eliminated? Your calendar tells a very important story. Read it.
Conclusion
As a business leader, it becomes your responsibility to manage time effectively. Only then can you empower your team and achieve the maximum outcome at work. By following the guidelines that Ajay Srinivasan has set for us, we can easily manage time more efficiently and make the most out of each day.