I am insanely busy as a manager. Often, I’m booked all day with meetings, supporting my team members, and solving problems, with little time to move projects forward. Here are some thoughts on why I am so busy that you may consider too.
Here are the primary items that I can improve to reduce my busyness
- Meetings as described in my previous post.
- Many standard business activities are managed manually (email) and require effort to “figure out” every time. The individual is typically the bottleneck and the “figuring out” needs to be replaced by standard processes.
- Some of my team members are newer and need additional support as they develop.
- We have a culture of creating more actions than we have time to accomplish them. These typically come from “good ideas” or Continuous Improvement and the culture leads us to feel obligated to support these activities. We need to create a filtering methodology or decision tree to determine which of these we will work on.
- I struggle with letting my team members solve their own problems. I want to be helpful and I don’t want to overburden them. I need to remember I am taking away from my team member’s growth by doing this.
I also need to create a filtering methodology for my activities which starts with the primary activities in my role which include:
- Developing team members
- Leading/determining what we should do in certain situations
- Strategy
- Removing obstacles for my team members
I have started addressing these sources of busyness in my work which has reduced my daily activity burden. Maybe some of these could work for you.