Most leaders have familiar approaches to managing time: setting goals, planning, delegating, tracking commitments, and creating to-do lists. While these approaches do help in self-organization, they are not adequate in helping achieve high levels of sustainable, long-term performance.

Time can be managed in four domains: Spiritual, Mental, Emotional, and Material. This corresponds to the four key functions of leadership:

• Mobilizing commitment.
• Thinking strategically.
• Building relationships and community.

• Focus on what's genuinely important in a day and do that, before checking your email.
• Check the email in time blocks, like once every 3 to 4 hours.
• Discard all impersonal unnecessary emails.
• Briefly answer messages that require an instant response.
• Use su...

Organizing for action means creating useful, workable and scalable systems that make us access information and track commitments quickly.
It means managing your email effectively and ensuring adequate follow-ups are done.

Time management practices require a change in behavior:

1. Know your purpose and establish why you need to change, identifying the benefits.
2. Create a vision of you being on top of your workday.
3. Observe the current cultural, organizational and personal pressures of your...

Phantom workload looks like real work but results in massive unproductivity and even conflict in an organization. The pressure to meet unrealistic expectations causes a vicious cycle of further workload.

Leaders need to take a hard look at what is being avoided or not addressed. Facing...

Instead of increasing the number of productive hours, we can focus on getting the right things done in a timely way. We also need to restore and balance ourselves, our colleagues, family and environment, instead of a neurotic or pathological focus on deadlines.

Find out wha...