Five Time Management Tips: Focus on What Matters Most
- Nancy Maher
- 6 days ago
- 4 min read
Updated: 12 hours ago
Leadership is a constant balancing act.
You’re juggling demands from clients, your team, and stakeholders, while driving strategic goals, amid constant interruptions and everyday tactical tasks that need to get done. If your time management is out of control, it will likely cascade down to your team.
The average worker receives 117 emails and 153 messages on Teams every weekday and is interrupted every 2 minutes by a meeting, message or email - a whopping 275 interruptions daily - Microsoft's 2025 Work Trends report
With so much pulling for your attention, it’s easy to get distracted by urgent but less important tasks and end up with meeting overload.
This article unpacks why time management techniques are an essential leadership skill and introduces five approaches to help you cut through the noise and manage your time and attention effectively.
Contents
Why Time Management Matters
‼️ If you don't manage your time, someone else will.
Why Time Management is Important
Whatever you are doing right now is based on a decision.
🧐 Ask yourself
"Does this task matter? Is there something more important I should be doing?"
Time management is important because it helps you allocate your energy and resources toward your most important priorities.
Time management is a skill, but on its own, doesn't drive impact.
Time management combined with attention management is where the rubber hits the road.
Five Time Management Tips
Manage: Meeting Overload
Every day, priorities change, and new situations arise, which means you need a way to prioritise at any given moment. Yes, you can set a goal for this week - but sometimes... something bigger and more important may need to take its place.
Without a straightforward prioritisation approach, you end up responding to the latest issue, saying yes to every meeting request and risking losing sight of the bigger picture (and your calendar).
Want some inspiration? Check out our 10 Inspiring Podcasts to Fix Meeting Overload
Block: Your Calendar
Another brilliant time management method is Time Blocking.
It's pretty simple - you block time slots in your calendar for deep work. Now, the key to this working is that you are clear about saying no. If your calendar is busy and you still let people pop in a meeting, they will keep doing it.
Prioritise: The Eisenhower Matrix
Prioritisation happens daily and sometimes moment to moment.
If you are not prioritising your time, someone else will do it for you. You cannot control the number of hours in your day, but you can control what you focus on.
The Eisenhower Matrix is a prioritisation framework that offers a straightforward way for you to evaluate, compare, and prioritise activities. This makes it easier to decide what to tackle now, later, delegate, or drop.
The key is consistency - pick an approach and use it daily, whether with a whiteboard and post-its or a digital tool like Trello.
This prioritisation framework divides tasks into four boxes based on urgency and importance:
Urgent and important: Do these immediately
Important but not urgent: Schedule them
Urgent but not important: Delegate
Neither urgent nor important: Consider dropping
It’s great for balancing immediate demands with long-term priorities, helping you delegate, drive goals, and ensure you and your team stay focused on the right work.
Organise: Kanban
Kanban is a visual workflow management system that originated in the Toyota Production System (TPS) and has become a go-to approach for agile project management among software teams. In Japanese, "kanban" is translated as "billboard" or "signboard".
Using a virtual or real-life whiteboard with columns that represent different stages of a process (such as "To Do", "Work In Progress (WIP)", "Blocked", "Ready for Review" and "Done"), breaks down activities into small chunks. Hence, the status of all related work items is visible.
The goal is to optimise resources, drive continuous improvement, and ensure a steady flow of completed work. While this is intended for small and large teams, you can use it yourself for your backlog. Trello is a brilliant project management tool with Kanban templates to get you up and running.
By keeping your backlog up to date using Kanban and making work visible, you can consciously focus your time on what is most important.
Focus: The Pomodoro Technique
The Pomodoro Technique is a time management method that divides work into focused 25-minute intervals (called "pomodoros") followed by a short 5-minute break. It was developed by Francesco Cirillo in the 1980s using a tomato-shaped timer. This time management method encourages deep concentration and makes daunting tasks feel more manageable. Over time, these "pomodoros" can train your brain to stay present and help you celebrate progress, one interval at a time.
Final Thoughts
How To Make Time Management Tools Work for You
Time management is a skill. While we've laid out a bunch of time management tips, these tools are only valuable if you use them consistently and adapt them to your context, personal preferences, and leadership style.
So, whatever time management strategies you use, be consistent. Use these daily and update priorities as circumstances change.