From the course: Jeff Weiner on Leading like a CEO

Time management

From the course: Jeff Weiner on Leading like a CEO

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Time management

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- Time management, I think a number of you have heard me talk about this before. If you scheduled every minute of your day, and at the end of the day you're thinking to yourself, "God, that was great, so productive, "I'm really getting this done," uh-uh. If you're scheduling every minute of every day, you're not leaving any time to think, any buffer time, any time to catch your breath, you're not doing your job. The more senior you become, the more you're responsible for others, the more you're responsible for making decisions, for prioritizing, for thinking strategically, for thinking proactively, for thinking big, for establishing a vision, the more time you need, unscheduled time I like to call buffer time. This meeting, after meeting, after meeting, after meeting, it's not going to get it done. You may think if your schedule looks like this, you're really something. (instructor laughs) Super productive, right? Super efficient, effective, you're jamming all that stuff in. You want your calendar to look like this. I schedule 90 minutes of buffer a day. I've been doing it for the better part now, eight plus years. Sometimes it's 60 minute block here and 30 minutes there, very rarely it's 90 minutes in one sitting, more often than not it's three 30 minute buffers. We talked about one of the most foundational elements of being aware, anyone remember what that is? Mindfulness practice. If you're going to be mindful, you've got to have time to just be. You can't just be going from one meeting to the next, have one person after another coming to you with a problem. You've got to be able to just take your time, to just think, to literally connect the dots, to digest what you've been hearing, to have an extemporaneous conversation with someone you didn't plan on meeting with, for someone to take advantage of an open door situation, to bump into someone and start brainstorming on something super creative, get through your inbox so you don't feel this constant avalanche of pressure, like you're falling behind. Those things will undermine your productivity, they will undermine your morale as an individual. And then what good are you in terms of inspiring others? You've got to take the time to take time. Okay? Establish those buffers. It's a huge part of doing your job, even though you may not have heard that before. With regard to priorities, make sure you are walking the walk. And while we're on the subject of calendars and time management, if you're interested in knowing somebody's priorities, don't ask them to show you their do-do list, or their stack ranked list of priorities, take a look at their schedule. And I don't mean it in a creepy, privacy-intrusive way. (class laughs) I mean figuratively. Take a look at your own schedule, start there, see how you're spending time, what are you allocating time to? You may find, more often than not, it is not aligned with your priorities. It wouldn't surprise me in the least, which means you should either do what? One of two things. Change your priorities or change your schedule, this man is en fuego.

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