People managers, when considering their daily workplace tasks, will usually divide their responsibilities into 3 kinds, in the following order of priority: personal work responsibilities, delegation, and, finally, the least urgent tasks will be postponed.

Thus, when charting out their day, upon entering their office, they will begin by planning their personal responsibilities and only afterwards will they see what tasks are there to delegate or to postpone. In theory, this makes sense, but it can bear some long-term effects that hamper time management. The postponed tasks tend to pile up rather quickly. Later on, these tasks will have to be dealt with, and it will be at the cost of more time. More often than naught, personal time is taken to complete these tasks, at the end of the day or maybe even during the weekend.

Doing this greatly enlarges the time needed to complete our daily workload. This process can cause burnout, since it inevitably leads to sacrificing more and more of one’s personal time to tackle what was postponed. This mindset can also make one prone to delegate hastily and improperly. It is common for overworked managers to delegate without training nor monitoring which can yield less than stellar results, because they are so swamped with postponed tasks.

To solve this vicious cycle, our speaker encourages leaders to chart out their day in a different order. The first thing a leader should try to do is to minimize urgency – instead of focusing on tasks based on their urgency, they should be handled like any other task with proper preparation and anticipation. So, instead of hastily prioritizing these tasks over others, Luís Martins Simões suggests doing the postponed tasks first. After these, leaders should attend to their delegation duties properly, ensuring that the person in charge is trained and that the delegated work is monitored. Only then should leaders tend to their personal work responsibilities. By adopting this order, leaders will eventually find time for another key type of tasks: pleasureful tasks.

These tasks help break the pressing pace of the everyday workload and effectively reduce the number of hours that we dedicate solely to our job.

In conclusion, the 4 key attitudes of effective management should follow this order:

1) Minimize urgency and deal with postponed tasks,
2) Delegate properly – with training and monitoring in mind,
3) Tackle personal work responsibilities,
4) Schedule pleasureful tasks.

Don’t forget to check out our course plans to find the one that best suits your needs – challenge yourself to master time management and leadership!