Time (Priority) Management - Part 1 (Hall Of Fame Guidance)

Summary

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Manager Tools Podcast

Episode: Time (Priority) Management - Part 1 (Hall Of Fame Guidance)
Date: May 14, 2006
Hosts: Michael Ozan and Mark Horstman

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Episode Overview

This episode of Manager Tools dives into practical, actionable methods for time—more accurately, priority—management. Hosts Michael Ozan and Mark Horstman focus on aligning how managers spend their time with their stated priorities, highlighting the common disconnect in even the highest corporate levels. Through clear steps and illustrative anecdotes, they lay out a precise framework to help managers evaluate and redirect their focus towards what matters most.

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Key Discussion Points and Insights

1. The Disconnect Between Intentions and Actual Time Use

• Executives’ Schedules Often Don’t Match Their Claimed Priorities
  • Mark describes his consulting visits, where he compares executives' calendars to their stated priorities.
  • “It’s really hard to argue that you should be able to keep your job if your schedule doesn’t reflect your priorities and your priorities go undone.” — Mark (02:33)
• Fire Drills Are Not a Substitute for Ongoing Focus
  • Businesses often rely on “fire drills”—sudden, intense periods of focus—to make up for day-to-day inefficiencies.
  • This strategy leaves no room for error and is unsustainable when multiple challenges arise at once.
  • "We make up for our overall inefficiencies by...sheer brute forcing things at times. And it works after a fashion, but that is not the most efficient or effective way to be, and it leaves you almost no room for error." — Mark (04:04)

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2. Manager Tools’ Four and a Half Step Process

Mark proposes a “four and a half step” method for aligning time use with real priorities:

Step 1: Roughly Assess Your Time

• No tools, just pen and paper.
  • Recall what tasks you worked on over the last two to three weeks, without checking your calendar, planners, or digital devices.
  • Purpose is not accuracy, but to shift mindset towards work awareness.
  • “What do I think I spend my time doing?... What we want you to do is think about your work days.” — Mark (06:27)
  • Emotional events are most memorable, but may not be most important (08:49).
  • Tangible Output: A raw, unedited list of activities.

Step 2: Capture Your Key Priorities

• Gather source documentation:
  • Job description(s), boss’s job description, direct reports’ job descriptions, recent performance reviews, key metric reports, and the last 10–15 PowerPoint presentations by you or your team.
  • “A lot of times people go back to their reviews and job descriptions, and it’s no relation to what they’re doing now.” — Mark (13:57)
  • If your job description is outdated, validate changes with your boss and document the divergence.
• Synthesize and Categorize:
  • Aggregate responsibilities into major categories — the building blocks of true priorities.
  • “Once you have an exhaustive list, start aggregated into categories that might look like major areas or priorities.” — Mark (18:00)
  • Key Rule: No more than 10 priorities at first; ultimately, boil down to your five key priorities.
• Quoting Drucker:
  • “The first thing you need to do is not ask what you want to do, because that’s what school children do. You should ask, what does this role require of me?” — Paraphrased summary of Drucker (21:34)

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3. The Challenge of Limiting Key Priorities

• Managers Resist Narrowing Priorities
  • Many claim far too many “priorities,” confusing tasks with true importance.
  • Mark describes the “spinning plates” phenomenon, where managers try to juggle dozens of tasks but lose focus on what’s genuinely critical.
  • “If you’re spending 8% of time on number one and you don’t meet your numbers for number one, if you work for me, you don’t have much defensibility.” — Mark (22:59)
• Best Executives Focus on One or Two Things
  • The most effective leaders know what their one or two true priorities are, and delegate the rest.
  • “The ones who are good... they got one, maybe two. Right people around them they’ve delegated to.” — Mark (25:17)

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4. Practical Guidance for Managers

• Don’t Skip the Early Steps
  • Though you might be tempted to move straight to goal-setting, both hosts stress the importance of the initial self-assessment and documentation steps.
    • “Don’t skip it. Okay, I got it.” — Michael (12:01)
• Documenting Priorities
  • After all the winnowing, write your five key priorities on a clean sheet of paper (26:06).

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Notable Quotes and Memorable Moments

• “You can’t make time, Mark.” — Michael (04:05)
• “We make up for our overall inefficiencies by cramming, by laser focusing, by brute forcing things at times.” — Mark (04:05)
• “The first thing we say, first thing we understand as an executive is the role. You don’t start by saying, what is it I want to do? In fact, Drucker talks about this very openly. He says, it’s not what I want to do, it’s what the role requires of me.” — Mark (02:58)
• “The ones who are good, the executives who are really good, that I admire, they got one, maybe two right people around them they’ve delegated to. And those people are good. In fact, in some cases way better than the executive.” — Mark (25:17)

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Timestamps for Key Segments

• [00:50] Introduction to priority management and the time dilemma
• [01:27] Discussing the mismatch between stated priorities and actual schedules
• [04:03] Why “cramming” and fire drills are not a real solution
• [05:22] Introduction of the “four and a half step” process
• [06:27] Deep dive into Step 1: rough time assessment by memory
• [12:26] Step 2: collecting documentation and defining key priorities
• [21:34] Drucker’s advice on executive priorities
• [25:02] Spinning plates – why many managers resist narrowing focus
• [26:06] Action step: write down your five key priorities

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Tone and Language

The hosts maintain a candid, sometimes playful but highly practical tone. They stress action over theory, favoring direct advice and real-world anecdotes, with a few references to management classics (Drucker) and their own consulting experience. Their critique is firm but encouraging, pushing listeners to adopt a disciplined mindset without getting lost in perfectionism or over-analysis.

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In summary:
This episode reframes time management as priority management, urging managers to honestly assess their use of time and clearly define what matters most—then align their daily activity accordingly. The Manager Tools approach is practical, minimal in jargon, and focused on tangible improvement.

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Transcript

[A]

Welcome to the Manager Tools podcast for Monday, May 15, 2006. Hi, this is Michael Ozan, and on behalf of myself and Mark Horstman, welcome to Manager Tools. This week's cast is about every manager's most precious and perishable resource, time. It marches on mercilessly every day, only more slowly on those days before vacation and more quickly on Sunday. Most managers do a terrible job of using their time effectively. In other words, most of us are terribly inefficient. This cast will teach you the basics of how to become effective at using your time, which will make you both more efficient and effective.

[B]

So finally, Mike, after nearly a year, we've made some time for a cast about time management.

[A]

No, we haven't made time work. You're constantly beating me up about my vocabulary and language around time. And as you always say, we can't make time. And we're certainly, although we're high Ds, we're certainly not God here.

[B]

Okay, I agree. So since we're going to be sensitive about time, since it's a perishable commodity, let's get right to our recommended approach for being efficient for executives.

[A]

Excellent. Okay, so there's some basics about time management. Let's talk about the basics and we can get into a little bit more detail.

[B]

Yeah. As I mentioned in my blog a while back, I get paid to go in and work with executives. And when I do, the first thing I do is ask about their schedule. I say, look, I want to see your calendar. And usually an assistant prints it out and I analyze it, and at the same time, I'm asking the executive about what their priorities are. And then I try to match up their stated priorities with their calendar. And you know, Even executives make $250,000 a year, Mike.

[A]

And they always match up, right?

[B]

Not so much. They rarely agree. And I understand why. I've been there and I understand that. And really there's a part of me that feels bad about this in a way because I feel like I'm getting paid very well to harvest some pretty low hanging fruit. It doesn't take rocket science, it doesn't take a lot of intellect to do this, to just start there and say, hey, I, I think you could, you know, if in fact you say these are your priorities, if they really are, then let's just make sure you spend time on your priorities. And if after three or four months, you get better results by spending time on your priorities, gee, I've earned my pay 10 times over. It's really hard to argue that you should be able to keep your job if your schedule doesn't reflect your priorities and your priorities go undone. Right. If you've got three priorities and you can't find your boss, can't find them in your calendar and those three priorities look bad in terms of metrics or reporting, what are you going to say? Well, I didn't want to do them. Surely the first thing we say, first thing we understand as an executive is the role. You don't start by saying, what is it I want to do? In fact, Drucker talks about this very openly. He says, it's not what I want to do, it's what the role requires of me.

[A]

Right.

[B]

That's why a lot of people who get to CEO say, wow, I want the job. I didn't realize what the job required of me. This is a lot different. And to be really effective, you have to ask what it requires of you. And you have to constantly re ask yourself that at the executive level, probably every six months.

[A]

Okay, that makes a lot of sense.

[B]

Yeah. Now, there is a caveat here. You know, in the fast paced and demanding business world that we're in right now, there's very little room for error at the executive level. And again, if you aren't spending time on your key priorities, it's hard to argue that you should be able to keep your job. But there is a caveat. People tell me, okay, Mark, the major stuff does seem to get done. You know, we're not getting fired. And yet you're telling me that all these executives are way off base when it comes to how they're spending their time. How is that possible? And to some degree, I have a little bit of a glib answer. And of course we're talking to high level here. So we can get in more. If we had more time, we get in more detail, but there we go. If we had more time.

[A]

How many times must I tell you?

[B]

You can't make time, Mark. It's somewhat of a glib answer, but in many cases the answer is it's the fire drills. Every once in a while, what's really important becomes time wise important. And the boss tells everyone for the next week, no one does anything but X. You know, it's the end of the quarter, we've got to get our numbers up or for the next period of time, we've got a big push on to do this or that or the other thing. And so what I'm getting at is that overall, we, we make up for our overall inefficiencies by Cramming by laser focusing, by sheer brute forcing things at times. And it works after a fashion, but that is not the most efficient or effective way to be, and it leaves you almost no room for error. And if you have a double whammy of you're not really available and your people aren't really at their best and the market turns south and you all at once, you have a triple witching hour and suddenly there is no amount of brute force you can do when your competitors are doing it right to overcome that fact. And you report a bad quarter and suddenly people start worrying. If they're smart, they start worrying. In a public corporation.

[A]

Yeah. Okay, so in our best Manager tools tradition, what the heck can we do about it? Even better, how can Manager Tools listeners take advantage of this opportunity to become more efficient and thereby more effective?

[B]

Okay, I feel bad about this, but I'm going to say I'm going to do something that we did recently and the cast a while ago, which is I actually have four and a half steps. Not four, not five. I know, I know. Sounds dumb.

[A]

Did I say anything? I didn't say that.

[B]

No, you didn't. Yeah, exactly. You didn't say anything. You just had a very descriptive facial expression, which we'll talk about later in a cast on high Ds, I'm sure. Step one, roughly assess your time. Not hard to do. Step two, capture your priorities. Step three, do a rough analysis. Or step three A. This is the half in there. Do a Drucker analysis, which is a little bit more detailed and it's not hard to do.

[A]

I like the sound of that.

[B]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Some people will, but it's probably reserved for the executives that we've got. But some of the more people who are really excited about this will do the Drucker analysis. And it's worthwhile. It's a very interesting analysis. And then step four is to put your number one priority on your calendar first. So those are the four and a half steps. Let's go through the details.

[A]

Okay.

[B]

All right.

[A]

Roughly assess your time. What's that about?

[B]

Easy step. And you can actually skip this step, but I don't recommend it. I mean, you could actually start with step two, but step one really kind of puts you in the right mindset, the right frame of mind, and it doesn't take hours. We're talking about minutes here, or less than an hour to get this done. We want you to sit down with a pen and paper, nothing else. Okay. Nothing else. Pen and paper. And ask yourself a simple question. What do I spend my time doing? Yeah, I could make it a more complex question, but that's really what it boils down to. What do I think I spend my time doing? And in terms of you have to have a sample because you can't think of the last year. It's too big, your brain can't handle it. So you think back over the past two to three weeks. If you're saying, okay Mark, which is it, two or three? Pick three. More data is generally better to do some analysis on. You want a bigger pile to sift through. Okay, and what we want you to do is think about your work days. Now I just said earlier, pen and paper and nothing else. Don't look at Outlook in advance, don't look at Lotus Notes, don't look at Oracle Calendar. Okay? Don't have your BlackBerry next to you. Don't have your trio next to you. Don't have your PDA next to you. No Franklin Planners, no Daytimers, no day runners, nothing. Pen and paper. Because that's what you deal with at work. When you're going from meeting to meeting, you don't have all that stuff right in front of you reminding you. We want to get you in a framework of thinking about your work. Not about your time really, but about your work. Okay. Okay, so we're going to infer some things about time from your work.

[A]

Okay. Are we trying to get a number? The number of hours I spend on a day, the number of hours I spend in the week is perfect percentages. What is the, what am I writing down? What am I writing down here really?

[B]

A list of things you did. A list.

[A]

Okay, Just a list. Not time, just, just how I spent it.

[B]

Work. Yes, exactly. And that's an important distinction. Work versus time. We're going to think about time, but really what we're going to be looking at is work. We're not looking for numerically valid analysis here, okay? We're not looking for six sigma level thinking. We're suggesting you get in the mindset of thinking about your work in the construct of. And really what's probably going to happen, Mike, is people are going to discover how much of their time they cannot account for.

[A]

Right?

[B]

So here's what they do. What's going to happen is they'll remember the big stuff. You're going to remember meetings, key deliverables. You'll also remember things that the time seemed important that were blow ups or interesting or exciting or whatever, but in hindsight, you know, just seemed interesting at the time. But really don't make that much difference. And in fact, the reason for that, by the way, is you're remembering them now. Sorry. Is because they had emotional content at the time. And emotion is the reason we have memory. Emotion is the thing that makes our memories how we feel about things and how we categorize things. I wish it weren't so. I'm sure it's true for you. I wish it was just all logic and rationale, but it's not. It's emotion. So those things that are most emotional are the things are going to be easiest to remember. Okay. And I'm really talking about, you know, maybe you spend 45 minutes. At a minimum, you're going to spend 15 minutes. And basically what we want you to do is from memory alone, come up with as many things as you did. A list of things that you did. Attended a meeting on X, attended a meeting on Y, met with Joe in my one on one, gave feedback to Bob, whatever the case might be. Okay? Literally a list, a raw list of all the stuff that you can remember you did in the past three weeks. You don't need to edit it. You know, we're not going to suggest that you're wrong about what your memory is. We just want a raw list. If you want to do an additional step from this, if you want to think about it a little bit more or get into a little teeny sense of analysis, you can categorize the list if you want, but you don't need to because this list is so raw that it's not. It's not helpful to categorize this raw list, in my opinion. I didn't used to recommend this step, Mike. I do now because if I don't and people start the more detailed analysis that we're going to get into, step two and step three and three A, they get frustrated. They haven't gotten ready for it yet and they haven't thought about work for the past couple of weeks. And people get overwhelmed with the details. So we just want them in the mindset of thinking about work and time.

[A]

Okay?

[B]

Over a three week period. And look, if you don't have your calendar in front of you and you're trying to think back to three weeks, folks, don't feel bad if you suddenly remember. Suddenly discover you can't remember a darn thing about three weeks ago Tuesday.

[A]

Yeah, that'd be me.

[B]

Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, I may be okay with that because I'm really pretty careful about my time. But. But without my calendar, I don't know I'd have To do it again. To be really, really sure. Yeah, but. But anyway.

[A]

All right.

[B]

It doesn't matter how categorized you do it, what characterization, what analysis you do, because trust me, this is past tense. It doesn't matter. There's nothing you can do about the past. And your. Your thinking will have changed when you finish step two, three, and four. Okay, so.

[A]

Okay, so that's. That's step one.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

Just a list of activities.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

Things I've done.

[B]

And again, you can skip it, but I don't recommend it because it's really helpful to get a sense of what your memory gives you and what your schedule will tell you, and then what your schedule will not tell you as well.

[A]

Okay, well, I've learned to trust that when you tell me, don't skip something.

[B]

Yeah. Okay, good.

[A]

Don't skip it.

[B]

Okay, I got it.

[A]

Okay, so step one, we're gonna get a list of kind of the things we're working on. Gonna look back over three weeks, no.

[B]

Calendars, and I'll just let the cat out of the bag and recognize you have a really bad memory and you're not gonna have a lot of things written down, and it's gonna be pretty random about whether or not they're valuable. Right, right.

[A]

Right. Okay, so then step 2. Capture your key priorities.

[B]

Yeah. And it's a pretty simple step. Again, you might be able to do it. You'll probably be able to do this in less than an hour. Now, there's a little advance work in some cases, so it may take a day to find some of your source material. Now, to be fair, you may not have any source material to work with. This is probably particularly true for some of our professional members so on, like our friend and member, Tim G. The dentist, or small business people where their organizations haven't yet built the documentation that helps out in this case. And that's fine if that's the case. Just hold on to your notes that you come up with during this step for later when you start thinking about building that kind of infrastructure in your organization, job descriptions and so on. What you do in this step is you gather up your job description, your boss's job description, your directs job descriptions, your last couple of reviews. Obviously, if they're in the job that you're in now, you don't need job descriptions or reviews from your previous jobs, any documents that you report, key metrics on. So maybe you do a monthly or quarterly business report to your boss or to finance or to operations or whatever you want those. And then something else. The last 10 to 15 PowerPoint presentations that you or your team and. Or your team have presented. About two years ago, I added this one. And the reason why is because things change pretty rapidly. And a lot of times people go back to their reviews and their job descriptions, and it's no relation to what they're doing now. Now, to some degree, that's because they're way off base with their priorities. Their job really hasn't changed, but they've gotten so far down in the weeds that they can't find their way back up to the forest and the trees. Okay, but in other cases, it's legitimate. Mark, we're working on something completely different here. And yeah, that was my job description, but there's no question I'm not going to be evaluated based on that job description a year from now. I will say this, though. If you're a savvy manager, if you're a politically savvy manager, if your job description has become outdated but there's not a new one, and you're absolutely certain that you're down in the weeds for the right reason at the end of one of these days, in the next three or four days, pick your head up out of the weeds, go to your boss and say, look, I just want to be clear. This is what my job description says. We're in a completely different place. And I just want to validate that a little bit. And if you say, yeah, yeah, yeah, look, I'm going to send you an email, I'm going to attach the job description to it, and I want you to respond back, yeah, you're right, this is outdated. We need to work on that. Otherwise, what could happen? Mike, you got a job description X, when in fact your job in, your assumption and your boss's assumption, really your job now is Y. What happens potentially at the end of the year if you don't have that conversation?

[A]

Oh, you have a big discrepancy. You have an argument about what do you mean? I was supposed to do this? I was focused on doing exactly right.

[B]

Yep. In other words, your boss in a rush, because we know how bosses do in terms of job descriptions and reviews, starts evaluating you based on the review for whatever reason, because his boss thinks the job hasn't changed or he hasn't briefed it right or whatever else. And now you're in a pickle and. And you worked your butt off all year and you're in the wrong spot. Yeah, you need to dot your I's and cross your teeth.

[A]

Yeah, I've seen that.

[B]

Yeah. Yeah, me too. And I don't like telling organizations you need to work on these job descriptions. And in fact, that's where I came up with the recommendations. If you remember, in one of our forecasts about annual reviews, we said, this is a quick way to come up with a job description. You can go back to that cast now. If you're wondering how much your job description has changed, answer those questions and you can come up with a paragraph that, that you could submit to your boss to update your job description really easily. It's not, you know, you're not paying an outside firm for it. You can save a lot of money, too.

[A]

Absolutely.

[B]

And it's accurate. Okay, so again, you want those PowerPoints because if things have changed a great deal, you want the PowerPoints to tell you this is the kind of stuff we're working on. Not necessarily the PowerPoint topic is going to be in your job description or in your thinking about your responsibilities. But you can aggregate it or you can say, I'm going to infer that in fact, we changed and this PowerPoint is representative of this general category of priority that I'm going to be thinking about. Okay. Now some people add a step about going and talking to their bosses and going, talking to their team. I've tried that a couple times. Sometimes it works. It depends on the culture because we're talking to individual managers here and we're not talking to an organization as a whole. I generally say stay away from that step because it'll add a couple of weeks to this and you don't want to add a couple of weeks. We're trying to make this as granular, as atomic as possible so that when people do this, they can get some satisfaction about it within a week. Right. We don't want to take a month to do a time analysis. Okay. You don't need that long. So yes, you can add that step. You can interview people, you can talk to people and so on. But scheduling that and making it happen and then analyzing the data and so on and coming up with a list of questions and everybody asking everybody the same questions and having a form, you don't need to do it, I don't see there's enough additional value to justify the delay in completing this four and a half step process.

[A]

Okay, okay.

[B]

Okay. So with all these documents in hand, take some notes, and basically what you're asking yourself is, what are my key priorities? What can I infer from all the stuff I've got some of it's not inference if your job description is Accurate. That's not an inference. You just literally lived off of the job description. Your key priority is X that it's lovely. A lot of firms don't have that. And that's okay. If you're not smart enough to infer from a set of tasks into key priorities, you ought not to be a manager. So the best way to do this though, is to start capturing everything in terms of the responsibilities and so on. And once you have an exhaustive list, start aggregated into categories that might look like major areas or priorities. Again, you may have to infer from tasks right down into the weeds up to what the priority headings are for a group of those tasks. That's fine. That's what we're asking you to do. We're asking you to think, to synthesize, to analyze at the task level and to synthesize that, aggregating it up into. Okay, when I glom all these together, what's the category those fit under? Because you wouldn't want a job description that has 75 tasks on it. Give me a couple examples of. Sure. You know, one on ones are certainly something you do. But on the other hand, that you may put that in the category of development of your folks.

[A]

Right.

[B]

It might be, might be something around monthly reporting. You might be preparing a monthly report and then preparing a personnel attrition list and so on. And that may be running your business according to some metric. You know, you've got a, you've got a 34% profit margin or 19% profit margin or operating income level or something. And that, that's your priority is the operating income. And then there are categories of tasks that go underneath that. Okay, now look, it's okay to have a list of as many as 50 tasks that you think you're responsible for. Okay, to start with. But you can't have 50 priorities like I said, or 75 tasks. So the rule of thumb here is you can't have more than 10 priorities. And I'm going to go a step further. 10. 10 priorities. Okay, but now you start pushing back. This is when people start pushing back. Because I asked you to come up with key priorities, not priorities. Okay, fine, nomenclature. Maybe you don't like that. I'm not trying to make this impressive. I'm trying to give you verbiage to get you started on doing the work. What's important here is not what we call it, the naming, it's the actual work. Now take those 10 and boil them down to no more than five key priorities. It may be that they're all priorities. But you're going to say which five are the most important. Maybe you can't take the 10 and turn them into a list of five. In other words, taking two and putting them together into one. I don't care about that. You're going to have 10 priorities, but five of them are going to be key. Okay, just five. You may put those five as secondarily or as tier two priorities. They're still priorities to you, but, you know, you want to use a different name, that's fine. No more than five. Now tell you a brief story. Peter Drucker talks about executives, of course, talked about executive time management all the time. In fact, Drucker's book, the Effective Executive, the First Prescriptive Chapter, which is actually chapter two, Chapter one, he talks about effectiveness can be learned. Chapter two is Know Thy Time. And he specifically walks through all essentially a different way, a more comprehensive way of doing this for executives. And we'll talk about that. Step three and a half. Step three A. But when Drucker used to talk about executives, he would say this. He would say, look, the first thing you need to do is not ask what you want to do, because that's what school children do. You should ask, what does this role require of me? That's the first thing an executive asks. And then what she says is, okay, if that's what it requires of me, what do I need to do in order to achieve those requirements? And he says, now, look, if you come up with a list of five, no offense, but you're wrong. Because the executives that I know that are highly effective, and that's the title of his book, the Effective Executive Do One Thing Very, Very well, only one. And they delegate other things to other people. It's not that those things aren't getting done. They choose one. Some of the people that he knows are capable enough, competent enough, brilliant enough, clever enough, energetic enough to do two. But he called three a circus act, which I find fascinating because when I ask people how many produce there are, they never have less than 10.

[A]

Right? Right.

[B]

And so I get them to 10. The reason we go from 50, if you will, I'm making that number up to 10 to 5, is because people will push back at me from going from 50 to 3. I can't get them to do it. They just say, it's like. It's like, you know, I can eat three hot dogs for dinner if I'm really hungry, but that doesn't mean I can eat 50. If I really, really had to Right, right. They just won't do it. In fact, if we spend enough time on it, we whittle them down and we categorize and we recategorize and we. We shave off some of the loose ones and so on. Yeah, we can get down to three, but I asked to go in two steps, down to 10 and down to five, because people won't get to three. And quite frankly, I think in some cases, some managers don't want to get to one because they know what's coming, which is that one is not getting done right. In some fashion, they're nervous about how much time I spending on number one. And they say, oh, I'm only spending 8% of my time on number one. No offense, but if you're spending 8% of time on number one and you don't meet your numbers for number one, if you work for me, you don't have much defensibility.

[A]

Yeah, that's a problem.

[B]

Yeah. I don't mind if you're spending a lot of time and you're ineffective, but if you're not spending your time on the right stuff, geez, we expect that. That you're a manager, you're an executive. That's a given. You're not doing it. Okay. Okay. So no more than five key priorities. Now. It's funny. I really do think I want to go back to the whole 50. Down to 10, down to 5, down to 3 thing. I believe part of the reason managers and executives minds Rebel. I could be wrong, Mike, and you may have a different perspective on this is that there's no overarching priority to their management of their schedule. They're scheduling things, tasks, small items, granules, atoms, if you will, granules of sand. But there's no overarching priority. There's no filtering to say no, that doesn't fit into one of my parties. So therefore, because I don't have enough time anyway, I can't put it on there. And they end up becoming. They end up seeing each one of their tasks as a priority. And here's the phrasing that it comes across as. Right now, this thing I'm working on is my priority. And yeah, you can only do one thing at a time. But that's a red flag for me. When I hear that, I'm like, oh, boy, this person's got 50 priorities. 50 tasks they're working on this week rather than my priorities are this. This task fits into that priority there. I might could demote this task right now and pick on something else. As long as the other task I'm working on still aggregates up to one of my key priorities. But I'm okay with five. Okay. I'm okay with five because we're not getting paid an arm and leg. Sit there and work through it with them.

[A]

If you get 50, that's. That's a problem.

[B]

What percentage of people do you think, Rebel, I'm going to take 100.

[A]

Right.

[B]

What percentage of that? 100. How many of that 100 came up with a number between 30 and 100 tasks that never got down to three when I was working with them or that it took extra time and billable hours for me to get down to 3?

[A]

70% of them.

[B]

I was going to say 60. Now you say that's not priorities. That's what they felt. They were all priorities. I call that spinning plates. That's what I call it. I'm not saying I'm right. I just.

[A]

Right.

[B]

The ones who are good, the executives who are really good, that I admire, they got one, maybe two right people around them they've delegated to. And those people are good. In fact, in some cases way better than the executive. But the executive has the team that is getting them where they need to go.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

So, okay. And that's why that phrase is so often heard. Mike, what is that phrase? When you interview somebody, an executive or a leader, senior leader or something says, well, it's not me. I just got a great team of people around me. Well, they know what their strengths and weaknesses are. They're leveraging their strengths on their key priorities, and they're delegating their weaknesses to the people who are better at it than they are. Yeah, simple. Okay, so you're going to come up with a list of five key priorities, and all you got to do is write them down on a clean sheet of paper. After all that analysis, after all that winnowing or aggregating or glomming together, whatever you want to call it. Clean sheet of paper, five priorities.

[A]

Okay, well, we're going to stop right there and cover the second half of this show on next week's podcast. So until then, be sure to visit us on the website at www.manager-tools.com or send us some feedback at shownature-tools.com so until next week, have a great one.

[B]

So.