It is not that we have little time, it is that we waste so much of it. That is a Seneca quote. So
Seneca is just a stoic Greek philosopher, and I am not going to do a Molly way. I know we all have
different amounts of time in a day. I know we all don't have the same 24 hours. It very much varies,
like if you've got kids that's already going to play a huge part in the time that you can spend
within your day. However, for the purpose of this episode, what we are going to talk about is those,
let's say, for argument's sake, seven hours, seven working hours that you have within your day and
the fact that more than ever, managers are disengaging. We're showing that we hate our jobs.
We are disengaged from our jobs. We don't like it. There's too much emotional labour. We're going to
really explore the facets of how to make sure that those seven hours per day are not miserable
or not horrible, make sure that we use them well. Time is your most valuable resource. It's
literally the only one that we cannot make more of. We can make more friends. We can make more
money, we can gain more status, but time is the one thing that you will never get back. And it's also
the one thing that will allow you to build all of the other things. And the older I get, like the
more experienced I become with in leadership, the more I respect the people who aren't constantly
busy and who have the ability to build boundaries around and protect their time. So that's what this
episode is going to do. It's going to give you the strategies, the plan of exactly how I have really
gone on this journey over the last few years of protecting my own time, why that's been so
important, but also the things that I've found difficult in doing it, because it's not all been
plain sailing. I want you to get familiar with this idea of buying back your time, buying it back.
And I don't always mean with money sometimes. I mean, you have to spend a little bit of time up
front to buy back a lot more time in the long run. So an example I'm going to give you of this is
delegation. Let's think about the idea, the concept of delegation okay. Let's say that I'm in fact I'm
going to use a really an example from my business right now. Tasha needs to build a social media
asset. Let's say she's building out a carousel for our social media. She sends it over to me, and
there's a couple of slides that I'm not quite keen on that I that I would do something slightly
differently in that moment. I have two choices choice one, edit it and send it back over to
Tisha and say, thanks, I've corrected it, approved it, whatever you can. Now go ahead and post it
quicker. Fast, okay. Option two spend a bit of time with t shirt and you can do this on like a loom
video screen recording video. Or you could just ring them on Slack or Teams and have a quick call.
You could set ten minutes for the next morning. I am going to talk you through the process of my
thinking as to why. I'm not sure these slides are right and what I would have done differently, and
help her help give her some of my marketing knowledge from the past few years. Help to explain
to her, like the psychological reasoning behind why I would have done what I would have done, and
then asked her to go away and try again and then come back. There's a big difference. Okay, the first
one. It's quicker for me in the moment, like it's so much quicker for me to just go, yeah, here's the
edit, here's it's done. But taking that extra time, that's that's proper delegation. Proper coaching
and delegation is not just telling people what to do and when to do it for and how to do it. It
proper delegation is telling is explaining the context. It's telling them the why, the
psychological reasoning. It's imparting your learnings and knowledge. It's exploring, you know,
do we need a system here? Like do we need to write down these rules about these carousels so that
next time you know exactly where to go to look, so you don't even have to come to me for this
approval. And it's by this is what I see now as buying back my time. Because yes, of course, that
takes more time in the moment. Like it's going to take 15 minutes or I'm going to have to record a
video, I'm going to have to exert a bit more energy explaining that thing in deeper detail. But
we're now out at the point with t shirt, t shirts, I think six months in to her job where I've
bought back that time, I've coached her, I've taught her as much as I can. I've taught her, you
know, every time I hand something over, I Nova explained to her the reasoning, the context, the
why she's now taking that and running for the hills and running with it. And I, you know, we're
getting to the point where I don't need to explain the context anymore. And as the content
comes through, I barely even need to approve it. It's just like a couple of tiny, tiny things. And
that is buying back your time. So many of us managers are stuck in this mode of like,
how do I just do the quickest, easiest way around the mountain as possible? How do I take the
fastest route to get to the other side of this immediate mountain? And then we get to the other
side of that mountain, and you turn around and you're like, shit, there's a whole other mountain
now that I've got to climb. And then a bigger one after that, and a bigger one after that, when we
could have just taken the slightly longer route, gone to the other side and then the car parks
right there, and it's like, how do we make sure that we're not just taking the quick, easy route
for a quick time win in the moment? Because I promise Future You is going to be annoyed at it.
This leads me on to something that you can't talk about time without talking about the word no. Okay.
You cannot talk about time without accepting the only way you gain more time for yourself. You. You
value your own time more, and other people value you. For it is getting really fucking good at
saying no to things that you either don't want to do. You're not good at doing. You shouldn't be
doing. Pushing back and setting boundaries and setting those boundaries is really tough. I
remember the scariest time I ever pushed bad. This sounds so menial right now, saying it out loud, but
at the time I was terrified. Was the first time I pushed back on a meeting to my own boss, and I'd
got this meeting request and it was, I think there was maybe 5 or 6 of us in the meeting, and I had
to go back to her and say, as much as, you know, I appreciate this valuable, I'd love to be in it. Is
it okay if I just join for the first 15 minutes? Because I've got to prioritise X, Y, and Z. And the
first time I did that, I was absolutely I was like terrified. But what I hadn't realised is other
people respect you more and respect your time more when you respect it yourself. We will use
this word respect a lot in my world, in my ecosystem of content on YouTube, TikTok, whatever. I
use the word respect a lot because a lot so many managers come to me and say, how do I get my team
to respect me? How do I build respect with my team? And the truth is, you actually can't get people to
respect you, especially not if you don't respect yourself. First, respect is something I think
that's internal. Like it starts with you. Do you respect your own time? You know, you can say, oh,
this the company doesn't respect my time. My manager doesn't respect my time. Well, do you like
are you just saying yes to all these meetings? Because if so, how can you expect other people to
when you've constantly taught them? Yes. I'll jump in at last minute. Yes, I'll fix that problem for
you. Yes, I'll say yes to this meeting. And so we can't talk about this idea, this concept of loving
our job more through saving time without talking about the word no, and setting boundaries and
pushing back. It's funny because on the internet you will see 1,000,001 different, like
productivity hacks, time blocking planners. You'll see 1,000,001 of them, I guarantee. As
someone who has tried all of them, none of them will be a magic pill. Like, none of them will fix
your issues with the fact that time is the biggest thing that you struggle with. When I speak
to managers about this as well, what they'll often say to me is the problem is they want to use kind
of all these systems and frameworks that I talk about, one on ones delegation, etc. they want to be
a better leader, but they just struggle with time. And that is the difference between working on the
urgent versus working on the important. The distinction we have to make in our head is the
urgent work is often the safer work. What I mean by urgent is things that if
they don't happen today or in the next week, you will notice. So emails don't get answered. Um, let's
say you don't go to meetings. You don't answer a client or you don't answer a team member on slack.
All of those things are urgent. What? We class is urgent, and our brain recognises them as urgent.
They're also very safe. They're generally like the business as usual tasks. You know how to do them
in your sleep. They're kind of easy. You're not trying new things. You're not experimenting. You're
not getting rejected. Like they are easy, safe things for you to do. And so you
by default will always be working there. You'll always be working in that urgent. Because if you
don't do it this time next week, someone will notice or you will notice. Your to do list will
keep getting longer and longer. But there's another side of work which is called the
important and the urgent. Important. They both sit on something called the Eisenhower Matrix, which,
if you've not heard of it, just a matrix to show some work is urgent and important. Some work is
urgent but not important. And it kind of shows you this way to sort of divvy up your tasks for me.
Honestly, the reason I'm not going to talk you through that matrix is because I have simplified
it in my head where I don't use a matrix, I just have a task list inside. My notion that is
literally just urgent and important in the urgent is my normal day to day to do list. And then the
important is the working on working on the business, working on the team, working on my own
leadership, on my own career. You will find things in there like building out systems. You will find
things like building out a podcast or like custard is a really important one. Custard was a
project. So custard, for those who don't know already, it's our cultural intelligence platform
for managers. Go check it out. I'll put the link in the show notes. You should definitely check it and
try a free trial. It's a nice little plug there, but custard was an important project for us.
It was something that for the first couple of years running Fresh Leadership World, it was this
idea. It was a it was a note in my notes app. It was through having all these conversations with
managers and realising that we needed this tool to measure the data inside of our team, and we
then needed like the support to be able to do it and the scale to be able to do it, etc. for a long
time it was just in my important list and I here's the thing with important stuff is if you
don't do it, no one notices. So we were for the first couple of years of fresh leadership world
making good money, you know, through workshops, through our Fresh Start bootcamp, through brand
deals, making a good amount of money like a good what we would call a lifestyle business. And it
was very cushy. Um, we were in our comfort zone for a long time, and custard as a product just sat
there on this important list, and if I didn't do it that week, no one would have noticed. And this
is the thing you have to realise, right? As human beings were so good at working to the last minute.
We're so good at working to deadlines, not letting other people down. Um, you know, never like not
pushing things out, not letting people down. The question you have to ask yourself is what happens
when there isn't a last minute? What happens when that last minute doesn't exist? The deadline
doesn't exist. The deadline is whenever the hell you decide you want to do it. Because I
guarantee your your subconscious brain will always prioritise the urgent stuff my brain did
for a long time. I was constantly just going back to the urgent, replying to clients as quickly as
possible. Um, you know, posting social media content every single day. All the stuff that if I didn't
do, yes, people would notice, but it was urgent. It was safe. It wasn't the important. And the
important is the things that will move you forward. They tend to be the bigger projects, the
more innovative projects, the things that allow you to work on, whether it's the personal
development, the system building, they normally just take longer, like you're normally talking
about a couple of hours at least, to get your head stuck into the beginning of one of these projects.
But what I've found over time, the best way that I work to this is, first of all, just being aware. So
being aware that there's a difference between urgent and important. Being aware that is there. Is
there a last minute if I don't put one on it, if I don't force myself, but then the next thing that's
really helped me is forcefully blocking out full days. So I used to think that,
say, if I had like a day, seven hours of work, whatever, and I just had 1 or 2 meetings that, oh,
it's fine because I've got, you know, four other five other working hours in that day. So therefore
surely I can work on the important stuff then. However, as you all know, and I do better than
anyone else, if you have a meeting at 10 a.m., at ten till 11, you are going to come into the
office. You're going to start work at nine. You know, you've got a meeting at ten, so you're not
going to get stuck in to any deep focus work. I wouldn't you're just going to answer your emails.
You're going to check slack. You're going to tick some things off because you've only got an hour.
You then you maybe you need to prep for the meeting. You go into the meeting, it finishes at 11.
You've got a set of three actions that you need to do off the back of that meeting. You need to go
and organise some stuff. Next thing you know is lunchtime. It's 12 half 12. So you have your lunch.
It's one half one. You've now got one of the meeting, let's say 3 p.m.. You've only got an hour.
An hour and a half again. You're not going to get stuck into that deep focus work. You've not got
time, you've not got the headspace for it. And so you just prep, you do more emails, you get stuck in
the day to day. You do. You do the meeting at 3 p.m. then by the time you're finished, as you know,
you've got a couple of actions and it's basically time to go home. And no one who has energy still
after 4 p.m. and it's like, this is how destructive meetings really can be to progress
if you're not so careful. Two meetings in a day doesn't seem like a lot. I that's that is very,
very normal, if not quite low. Yeah. Just those two meetings being positioned at the wrong time could
throw off an entire day of progress. And so what I do now, I've tried so many different methods with
this over the years, but what has worked so well for me over the last couple of years Is blocking
out full days. So yesterday was Monday. I didn't have a single meeting I had. Sorry. I had a small
day to catch up with the team, but after that nothing completely free all day because I needed
to get stuck into some chunky work for custard project work, deep work that required at least
four hours so that I could spend the first hour just mentally preparing to get myself focussed,
researching, then actually getting stuck in and then just, yeah, not having to worry about this
impending meeting that I've got coming up. And so the way I do it now is like block out the days.
Usually I will like fiercely block out Monday, Thursday, Friday. And normally 1 or 2 meetings will
creep in and then Tuesday and Wednesday. I'm, I like doing days like I'll be doing stuff, I'll be
with other people doing meetings and it's okay if it slips slightly, like quite often. I can't avoid
a Thursday meeting, but I'm just so forceful. And another thing you have to be very careful of is
if someone puts a meeting in for in two weeks time, your calendar in two weeks is going to look
pretty clear right now, as all of our calendars will do. Pretty chill. Pretty, pretty clear. Pretty
easy. By the time that week comes round, it won't be clear, you think just by pushing it forward a
couple of weeks that it will magically you'll be you'll be less busy. It doesn't. So don't decide. Oh,
if I do it in two weeks, I'll have more time for it, because that just won't happen if that meeting
isn't valuable this week. Is it valuable at all? Another big tool that you should keep in your
belt is with meetings. I. People are always shocked when I set like a 20 minute meeting and I have 20
minute meetings all the time. People are always shocked. Say I had like a like a um, someone
reached out to me on LinkedIn who wanted to just chat to me and ask me for some advice on a new
business idea. And he's great. And like, I kind of know him well and I wanted to speak to him about
it, but a lot of people would have just said, yeah, let's have an hour. Let's put an hour in. I'm like
20 minutes and I guarantee there would be such. There's so few more things we could have got
done in an hour than we could in 20 minutes, because when a meeting is 20 minutes, it forces
you into the discipline of like, let's get this shit done. We've not got time for small talk. I've
not got time for niceties. Everyone needs to prep. Everyone needs to understand the agenda. You need
to turn up ready. We need to discuss. And we need to decide. Get better with how you use your time
day to day. Another really great tool that I mentioned it a little bit earlier is loom. If you
guys aren't using loom yet, honestly, it changed my life and it's free. It's just a Chrome extension.
Obviously this is not sponsored, but we genuinely just use it all the time. Loom. Loom Chrome
extension. You can just attach it to Chrome. You click it and you can do a screen recording. It
saves so many meetings for you and your team because you can just give them feedback on
something really quickly. We use it now with the developer for custard, where if we get feedback
from a user, I'll send a screen recording over to the developer saying like, here's what the use
case is, here's what the issue is. How long is it going to take to get it sorted? I also use loom
for like when we have when I have proposal sessions for clients. So I get them on a call, do
this, do the whole sales like understanding their goals, understanding what they need to do in order
to grow, how I can help them. I send them over a proposal afterwards, and I always send it with a
loom video because I want those people. I want the person that I've had that time on the call with
to be able to go away and relay that information as best possible to their colleagues, to the other
decision makers. And if I give them a loom video, they can just go and show them that loom video
instead of having to explain it. And this is why I'm so I hate the word passionate for some reason,
but I am really passionate about middle management. And I always say like, we need to
rebrand middle management. We need to make middle management sexy again, because people have this
view of middle managers that is very current and we need to rerun the word current as well. The
name current people have this view of middle managers that we are
annoying, you know, boring jobs worth like just this awful view when in reality
We hold the entire emotional pressure of the organisation. We middle managers are the
translators. They are the people who take the strategy from the top, translate it downwards, and
we know from study after study, research after research that if you have a bad middle manager,
their impact on the team can sway 70% either way. So a great manager, a team will be 70% more
engaged, a bad manager, 70% less engaged. Just think about how much like emotional weight
that has on a manager. We also know the stat I talk about all the time, which is 69% of team
members say their manager has more impact on their mental health than their therapist or their
doctor, and the same amount as their partner. So it's like we can't ignore the fact that managers,
middle managers are wildly important to businesses, yet businesses just ignore them, just
completely ignore them. And so we have to as middle managers. This is why there is this
epidemic of middle managers disengaging and not enjoying their job is because the view of us, the
view of middle management, is so in the gutter. It's like embarrassing and it annoys me. Obviously,
I am on the side of TikTok where like leadership, entrepreneurship is like my entire freaking
algorithm. And I always see the videos of people like taking the piss out of managers. This is why
on my page you will never really see like the comedy content taking the piss out of managers,
because a lot of people love to do it and they get a lot of clicks and they get a lot of views,
but it's just not helpful. Like, I would get so much more of a bigger audience, of a wider
audience if I started slagging off managers. And we did a series recently that me and Tisha have
decided to retire, we did a series on Instagram and TikTok that was called Manager Please, where
it was like, we take out the worst manager stories. We had people texting in messaging, in,
Instagramming, in to tell us their worst stories of their managers. And there were so many bad ones,
like so many bad ones and so on. This series called manager Please, we were talking about these
manager stories and kind of exposing why they were so bad and what that manager could have done
instead. And I said to Tisha, I think we posted two of the videos and it was fine. I said, I think we
just need to pull this back because we're on the wrong side, like we're on the side of the
managers. We're on your side. My side. I am also obviously a manager myself. Like we're on the side
of the managers where, no, we don't get it perfect all the time, but it's just hard. And something I
really want to acknowledge here is for women like we also carry not only like the emotional
labour burden of leadership, but it's so common for women to also take on like the cultural
burden inside a team. So, for example, I know that a friend works inside a business and she's recently
taken on like organising the team days and a bit of HR responsibility when she's not trained or,
you know, anything in HR because she's a woman. Those things just naturally fall on us to do, like
keep the team cohesive. The emotional intelligence of the team, like keep everyone together. And so
there's all this, like, extra burden that falls on us. And it really does mean we have to do. The only
way we can fight back is to get so, so strict over our time. So don't be afraid to push back on those
meetings. Don't be afraid to have 15 minute meetings, ten minute meetings, and be really
cautious around that focus time, that energy and that focus time. How are you going to spend it on
urgent? How are you going to spend it? Unimportant. Turn off notifications. Like I always think I
think I read a stat once that was like, if you get a notification during focus time, it will take you
away. It will take you 20 minutes to get back into focus. And I actually think that's worse nowadays,
because sometimes if I have a notification on my phone, I go to him before I know it. This is so
embarrassing. Like before I know it, I'm just on TikTok. Somehow I found myself in the middle of a
doom scroll. Like sometimes I go to do a two factor authentication. And next thing you know, I'm
ten minutes deep into a scroll on Instagram. I'm like, how did I even get here? And so there's so
much in today's digital economy that is trying to steal your focus and attention away, and you've
got to force yourself away from it, push yourself back from it. I actually think two I
think two solid hours of work. You know, if you had two hours a day where you were like completely
focussed and not distracted at all, deeply focussed on your team, on the business would
actually outweigh eight messy, scattered hours. Like that's what I believe to be true now. And I
got a comment on one of my LinkedIn posts the other week when we were talking about launching
this podcast. And, you know, do we do it alongside launching custard, etc. and someone commented on
it saying, Heather, when do you sleep? And I read the comment and I was like, oh yeah, it does seem
like we're doing a lot, so why am I not stressed? Like, why am I not overwhelmed? And it's because I
just say no. I cannot tell you how many times I say no. I get invited to so many cool events down
in London, and I say no to them with cool people doing amazing things because is it actually
helping me, you know, reach my mission of building a world where everyone loves the work they do? Is
it really helping us build a business that's going to challenge and fulfil the team and keep
growing them like? Or is it just a massage for my ego? Because a lot of these things, these events
where you get to, you know, like rub noses with people, with influencers or whatever, they are just
a massage of my ego. And so I just keep saying no. And some people would say that that's bad for PR
in fact, many people have told me you need to do it for PR purposes. And I'm like, yeah, but I don't
just know, maybe I'm doing it wrong, I don't know. Let me know in the comments what you think, would
you want to see me at these influencer events? But I just know that the more I refine my time, the
more I say no, the more I push back. It means I have time and space to create all these things on
the outside look like I'm doing absolute shitloads. Whereas like, if you'd have seen me
yesterday, I have spare time. I'm reading for at least an hour every day and watching TV with Shah
for at least an hour every day. I'm cooking, I'm going to the gym every day. And like I said, when I
say this, it's with a pinch of salt. People who have kids I know you always come at me and you're
like, oh, she wouldn't be saying this if she had kids. I know that not saying that. I'm just talking
about pushing back on the things that are useless inside work, pushing back on the things that we
use up so much of our time for, but that bring no value to our life. And so I would highly just
recommend maybe it's finding that vision that's really helped me, like maybe it's been
understanding clearly what my vision and mission is, which is to build a world where everyone loves
the work they do. Therefore, outside of that, some of the things that come up, I can clearly say, does
this take me closer or does it not? So maybe we all need to find that mission vision, and it
doesn't have to be, as you know, like idealistic as the one that I've said. It could be something such
as, like building a great life for my family. It could be something like, you know, creating
something within inside work for your career. I don't know, whatever that is. You need to go find
it, because maybe that's going to help us all decide what we say yes and what we say no to
decide those boundaries. But the big message here is you're not alone. Like time is the
I mean, is the the only finite resource, but it's the biggest. When I sit in rooms and do workshops
with managers month in, month out and I go around the room and I say to them, what are you
struggling with the most in leadership right now? 70% of them guaranteed will say time in some way
or another. And so please just find a bit of comfort in the fact that it's not just you like,
you're not bad at your job, it's just that the emotional and physical pressure from modern day
leadership, what is expected of managers and what is given in return is so unrealistic, so
unsupported, so difficult. And so you're not alone. But we know that now we're in a management
position. We we kind of can't. The book has to start with us. We do have to take ownership for
this problem. So force yourself to say no. Force yourself to start reducing. Force yourself to time
block and really figure out what you're going to spend time on is important versus what is just
ego. Dopamine hitting. Ticking that box. Um, urgent stuff. And that leads me to a great point, which
is if you want help doing that, this is exactly why we built custard, guys. So custard gives you
data points from every single one of your team members. As a manager uses weekly pulse surveys to
tell you as a manager exactly where you need to be focusing your attention right now. Exactly. You
know how to level up your team, which areas they need improvement in and which they don't. Custard
is working on your team. It is the important work. It's the important stuff. The culture, the
leadership, the growing your career, the growing your team's career. We have always have incredible
offers on. So go down to the description, click the link and you can start a free trial. Just test it
out. You know you don't have to commit. You don't have to carry on. Just go test it out. I know you
want to thank you so much for being here every single week. So I haven't asked. We are going to do
an incredible episode in a few weeks time where we talk through all of your dilemmas and we undo
every single one of them. We talk through them, all of your leadership struggles. So please email your
biggest leadership struggle to hello at the Boardroom podcast comm. I'll put it in the show
notes so you can copy and paste it. Tell us what is your biggest leadership struggle right now? We
will keep everything very strictly anonymous. Um, and tell us that struggle because will most
likely come on to this episode in a couple of weeks time and we will undo, we will dissect, we
will solve all of those issues together. I'd love to hear from you, and I'll see you next week for
another episode of The Boardroom.