There’s plenty of noise (aka: things to do) when you’re a manager of a team: staff members coming up to you each day with questions/problems to solve/ideas to consider/personal issues, emails to answer, a ton of meetings to attend, people from other teams wanting a slice of your time, demands from your own boss, clients to catch up with, reports to write … and on top of all that manager stuff, you’re probably saying, “I need to do my own work as well.”
It’s easy to feel a bit overwhelmed.
At one of my previous manager jobs, I ran into this feeling a lot. So much to do, so little time … a cliché but it seemed to fit. After trying all the productivity tips, tools and software out there – none of which solved the fundamental problem – I decided to change tack.
Every Friday morning I would walk out of the office to go grab a coffee or walk around the block. When I did, I told myself to look at the sky. I would deliberately stop in my tracks, look up for a good 30 seconds or so, take a breath, relax, grin and ask myself three important questions:
👉 How is my team going?
👉 How am I going?
👉 What’s the one thing I can do today that will be good for me and my team?
You can ask yourself a whole bunch of other questions, of course. But I found that focussing on what’s ultimately important in your manager role (namely your team, and you of course) helped me silence a lot of the noise. It also served as a reminder, a jolt, a smack in the face, that we can only really do one thing at a time. And that we will never complete our ideal to-do list anyway.
The manager of another team had a similar approach. He would regularly, “Push my chair back from my desk, turn around, look out the window … and just think.”
You might find a different way of escaping from the never-ending tasks and emails, of clearing your head. Because a good manager has the ability to consider the bigger picture. To work out what you need to do as the leader to ensure your team keeps chugging along nicely.
It’s Friday morning as I post this. No coincidence there; time for me to head outside.
