How to manage time as a new leader

This blog is contributed by Amanda Stephens at seoplus+

As a new leader in marketing, there are several areas that demand your attention. All are important in their own way, though the consequences of neglect may come to pass much sooner in one area than another. 

If you work in an agency, you are committed to serving clients and have obligations the team is contractually required to deliver. Depending on your exact role this may mean you are responsible for the actual task execution itself, or perhaps only for delegating and reviewing work. 

Next as a leader you are committed to serving your team members, supporting them, training them, overseeing their professional growth, and holding them to account if they fail to deliver. This takes time and emotional energy. 

Then, you are committed to serving your department, making process improvements, resolving service issues, and enabling growth. 

Finally, you are responsible for serving yourself, investing in your own training and professional development and ensuring that your skills do not grow rusty. 

Perhaps that isn’t even final, as there are times where you may be organizing volunteer events, supporting the company’s own marketing efforts, representing the company at a conference, dealing with cross-departmental challenges, or overseeing the rollout of a new tool…the list goes on and on. 

Clearly, time management is critical. 

In this article, I am going to explore ways you can take control of your own time and maximize your experience in your new role.

1. You need to have goals

Why are you here? What is going to make this quarter more impactful than the last? How are we going to get better? You need to have goals that you are working towards, and understand how the actions you take support those goals. 

2. You need to have a plan

At our company we use OKRs (objectives and key results), but your goal planning can take whatever form makes sense for you. 

We track OKRs within our project management software to be accountable to deadlines, share status updates, and break ambitious projects into more digestible steps with tasks. 

For example, say your goal is to launch a new department by this time next year. If that’s the extent of your plan, it will never happen. With such an ambitious (and vague) goal, you might not make any progress towards it all, given your other commitments.

Instead, work backwards from the goal. What steps would be needed to get there? Your initiatives in support of that objective or key result might be to create a one-pager proposal by next week, or book a meeting with two colleagues to brainstorm ideas by the end of the month. 

Broken down into smaller, more manageable steps, you will make progress and have a realistic chance to achieve the objective.

3. You need to prioritize time

If there is one guarantee, it is that time will pass. It is going to be one year from now no matter what, so why not create the reality where you have achieved your goals? 

If you do not prioritize time, you will not achieve your goals, and you might not even make progress towards them. There is no need to overstate this, because each and every one of us have experienced this: where you have one priority item on your to-do list, yet you leave at the end of the day (or worse, the week, or month) with everything but this item done. 

Create and protect time for yourself to make progress on the tasks/projects in the “important/urgent” quadrant of the matrix, but also the “important/not urgent” quadrant. This big-picture, process-oriented quadrant is what so often loses the battle to urgent fires. 

Give yourself a daily block at your most productive time (morning? Right before lunch? End of the day) and protect it at all costs. 

4. You need to track time.

If you don’t have visibility into where your time is going, you can’t make informed decisions. 

In being meticulous about tracking time, you will be able to manage it better. For example, you may discover you spend 2 hours per day in Slack conversations with your direct reports. Is there a more efficient way to do this? Would jumping on a quick call save time? Is it better to ask direct reports to save questions for office hours or 1-on-1s? What training can we introduce to forestall this need for many questions? 

5. You need to set time limits

We’ve all had that task that “should” take 30 minutes, only to lead us down 74 rabbit holes and 5.5 hours of time. Take control of your time by setting time limits, even using a physical timer if necessary. Browser extensions like the Pomodoro method may be helpful as well.

This can be used in two different directions. One, it can stop you from wasting time on tasks that don’t move the needle. Set the timer and move on to the next thing when time is up. Don’t throw good hours after bad. 

But it can also be used to ensure you’re making progress on important but not urgent priorities like process improvements. Set your timer for 30 minutes, and then move on to your to-do list. 

6. You need to be organized

What worked in a specialist role, or back when you had one major responsibility or 5 clients on your list…it won’t work as a team lead. You are now responsible for every person in your department, every client, every process, every problem, and still need to manage yourself. 

If you have a “mental to-do list,” it might not cut it for much longer. If you have to-dos on paper, in task notes, in emails…it’s not sustainable. Create an organizational system for yourself. At our company, we use a “Daily Game Plan” to prioritize our time and ensure the most important things get actioned, while balancing commitments like meetings and training.

7. You need to delegate

Finally, you need to delegate some responsibility to your direct reports and trust them to get it done. For one, you need help. But it can also be empowering and motivating to them to contribute, and they may have a lot of value to add. 

Consider these different approaches to delegation:

• Train someone to be your deputy. They will take care of department processes if you are sick or on vacation. 
• Have them own one particular aspect of the department (such as SEO Audits or conversion tracking) and have them take responsibility for the processes, documentation, training etc. 
• Have them support or lead a particular project (such as designing a new Keyword Research template or investigating a new social scheduling tool).
• Have them execute the finer points on a project you lead (say you are breaking clients into bronze, silver, gold status, you would have them take the lead on updating the client folders with this new information). 

Time management is a critical skill for new leaders in marketing. By following these steps, you will be well positioned to excel in your new role and establish good habits as you grow and thrive in leadership.