It’s common knowledge that successful leaders protect and manage their time effectively. This isn’t an inspiring topic about how we can change the world. It’s a necessary topic for how we make time to do our world-changing stuff. The struggle to manage time is universal. We often know the work we need to do, but are nevertheless challenged to find the time to get it done. I’ve not perfected this, but I’ve learned some things over the years that have made a real difference for me.

Don’t work too long

It’s extremely common to talk about long working hours. We come in early. We leave late. We work nights. We work weekends. We don’t take vacations. And we wear it like a badge of honor. While crunch-time is a reality for most professionals, we need to time-box it. It’s ok to justify working extra to meet a commitment, recover from a disaster, or get a critical project over the finish-line, but once it’s done, we have to learn to return to sanity. Perpetual crunch-time isn’t just a recipe for burn-out. It’s a recipe for a mediocre career. The more we work, the less effective we become. Sure we get stuff done, but our most remarkable work can only be done when we are fresh and rested. That’s the deal. As with everything, this starts with leadership. Team members tend to emulate their leader’s work habits. That’s why I leave on-time with few exceptions and I use all of my vacation time.

Schedule your task list

We all have to-do lists. Whether we write them down, get them in email, or have them in our head, we all have things to do. They can’t get done until we make time for them. Once per day, take your task list and translate it into calendar items, estimating the amount of time it will take to complete the task. The beauty of this is that you now have time to work on your task. Before, it was just hanging over you, stressing you out. Now you have a set-aside time to accomplish it, and you can release it for now. If that time comes up, and you need to give your attention to something more urgent, you can move it, assuming it isn’t due. The main concept here is to treat tasks as blocks of time. I didn’t come up with this idea. I learned it from a productivity workshop called Mission Control.

Schedule your desk time for email

If I left my calendar free, I’d get booked nine hours for meetings every day. I could spend all day in meetings, then leave the office with an inbox-full of a days’ worth of email. I’ve spent seasons of my career like that and it’s totally unmanageable. Now, I block-off three hours-per day for desk time. I do an hour and a half in the morning, an hour at lunch, and the last half-hour of the day, so I can at least read my email before I head home. I generally try to avoid email multitasking during meetings, and I try to avoid going to meetings that don’t require my full engagement. Sometimes the needs of the day don’t allow me to utilize each of those periods, but I start with that as the plan.

Schedule your goals

We all have goals. We have performance goals we set for the year and we have long-term career goals. It’s important to set aside time to work on achieving these goals. Frankly, if we’ve done a good job of defining our goals, these are the most important things we should be working on. The One Thing, by Gary Keller and Jay Papasan, offers a solution on how to break-down our large goals into smaller steps and ask ourselves what is the one thing I can do today that will help me achieve that long-term goal? Then schedule time to get that done. Schedule it as the first thing in the day. The logic is that if I’m only going to get one thing done today, it should be the most important thing, so do it first. The authors advocate allocating the first half of the day to this. I haven’t gone that far, but I see how that could be ideal.

Schedule time for deep work

Most of our work is shallow. Email and meetings don’t typically require our full attention. Other work, such as preparing for a presentation, writing a blog, or debugging code requires intense focus and is best achieved in a quiet environment free of interruptions and distractions, early in the day, and in large blocks of time. Deep Work, by Cal Newport, covers a comprehensive list of techniques for conquering important work that requires intense focus. One of his best tips is to disconnect. Close Outlook. Exit Skype. Turn off your phone. Get alone. Our hyper-connectivity erodes our ability to do deep work. It’s quite possible that our most important goals and our activities that require deep work are aligned. If that’s the case, I highly recommend reading both of these books and putting as much of them into practice as you can.

Those are my tips. They are mostly common-sense, but can be hard to put into practice. It takes real discipline. Our time management practices make a big difference. You can go home at the end of a day exhausted and wondering where the time went, or you can go home with a feeling of accomplishment that you did your most important work. Have any time management tips of your own? Please share them in the comments below.