What almost nobody trains are the soft skills of time management. I don’t think it’s anybody’s goal to be way busier and stressed out than you want to be. That’s not why you wanted to move into the role, but you also don’t want to let any balls drop because you take pride in that.

The other unseen challenge is that your brain typically never turns off from work. If you were like me, you were constantly thinking about what else you had to get done that day even when you got home because you needed to get so much done starting early the next morning.

You’re thinking over the weekend about any teams you may have working and then Sunday afternoon rolls around and you’re already thinking about what has to happen first thing

Monday morning to get all jobs going without a hitch.

I found that there were periods of time that I thrived on being busy like that and enjoyed being the go-to guy for everything, but I also found that it led to burnout pretty quickly and the business didn’t let me use some of my other skills to help move the business forward in other ways.

So what I did to make sure I got that balance was start with some non-negotiables

within my role. The first non-negotiable was that when I was done with work, I was

done with work–I didn’t take it home (I’ve struggled constantly with this, but it has to be

a goal).

The second non-negotiable was that I needed to not work as many hours–my family and my own health have to have time and space so that I can be at my best while I am at work and at home. But how do you accomplish that when the bullets are flying and things need to get done? The answer is time management.

Everyone knows the concept of time management, but have you ever been trained on it? The goal of time management is to be efficient with your time so that you can get as much done as possible within reasonable working hours without dropping the ball on anything. There are three time management tools that have helped me navigate the busy schedule of an operations leader: email management, calendar management, and to-do lists.

Let’s first talk about email management. How many emails do you get a day? How often do you check your email each day? How many emails do you send out every day? Now, for the really fun one–how many emails are in your inbox? Is it hundreds, thousands, is it over ten thousand? A cluttered inbox leads to a cluttered mind.

I know there are different schools of thought about managing email and inboxes in general, but the method that I subscribe to is the goal of getting to inbox zero. The goal of getting to inbox zero is that at the beginning and end of every day, your inbox has ZERO emails in it. Now I’ve amended that to 15 emails or less, but my ultimate goal is still zero.

The first thing I do every day is delete junk, sort the remainder, and respond to emails that need a response and then file them in a folder so that they are out of my inbox. The next technique that I use then is only checking my email every hour or two, but I admit, I struggle with that–I often check my email way more often than that, but I’m still working towards only checking email 4-5 times a day.

Then to end my day, I do the same thing, I go through all emails and get my remaining inbox down to as close to zero as possible. Doing this every day means that even after four years in my current job, my inbox doesn’t have more than 10-15 emails to end any day. A clean inbox is a clean mind.

The next thing that I practice diligently and we teach is calendar management. What

does that mean though? For me, that means planning out weeks in advance for my placeholder meetings/events so that I don’t double book, but also I practice time blocking. I look ahead at the next day, days, or week and put blocks of time in my calendar for things that I know I need to do. When I put something on my calendar, it becomes non-negotiable – I do that thing at that time

With the gaps in my schedule, I allow for the things that come up naturally through the day and week. The other thing that we teach is to allow for some time blocks in your schedule and calendar for the unexpected–whether that is critical thinking time, phone call catch up time,

touching base with team members or leadership.

If you don’t build flexibility into your schedule, too often it gets filled up and doesn’t give the space for the unexpected things that come up during the week.

The final thing that I practice and we teach is the use of to-do lists. And to be clear, it is

a to-do list in writing. Multiple studies have shown how much more effective to-do lists

are when we write them off and cross things off our list. Our goal is to write a to-do list

immediately after clearing our inbox in the morning, or immediately after clearing our

inbox at the end of the day.

The reason for that is that many times things from our inbox land on our to-do list. There’s also something really cathartic about crossing things off of a written list and many times you find a super long list of things gets done in a much shorter amount of time than you would have anticipated just looking at the list.

The other benefit to a written list is that you can see similar types of tasks and bunch or

batch them together and get even more efficient at them. For example, maybe you have five customers to call and 10 emails to send, instead of doing them one at a time, you can do them all at once.

Being fanatical about these three things, Operations Leaders can bring sanity and order to what is by nature, a very chaotic position. No one wants to feel like all they do is work and have it consume every thought that they have. Additionally, no one wants to drop the ball and let anybody down. The only way to overcome this is with tools and a system.

I encourage you to try utilizing these tools over a period of 30 days and see how they can have a positive impact. The only resource we can never get more of is time.