Personal productivity for leaders: priorities, focus and energy

A manager’s calendar fills itself. Meetings, messages, requests and small fires arrive faster than anyone can handle them, and by Friday the important work (the strategy, the hiring plan, the difficult conversation) has moved to next week again.

For leaders, personal productivity mostly comes down to deciding what deserves your attention. This guide covers three tools that work together: the Eisenhower matrix for choosing priorities, deep work for protecting time to think, and energy management for doing your best work when it counts. It also covers what research says time management can and cannot do.

What time management does for you

A 2021 meta-analysis by Brad Aeon, Aïda Faber and Alexandra Panaccio, “Does time management work?”, pooled 158 studies with nearly 54,000 participants. It found that time management is moderately related to job performance (a correlation of about 0.25), and slightly more strongly related to wellbeing. The relationship with life satisfaction was stronger than with job satisfaction, and better time management went with lower psychological distress.

The authors concluded that time management may do more for wellbeing than for performance. Most of the studies were cross-sectional, so they cannot prove cause and effect. A fair reading is that good habits around time help, mostly by reducing stress and giving you a sense of control, but they will not turn a poor strategy into a good one.

Choose priorities with the Eisenhower matrix

The Eisenhower matrix comes from a line attributed to Dwight D. Eisenhower in a 1954 speech: “I have two kinds of problems, the urgent and the important.” Eisenhower credited the idea to an unnamed former college president. The matrix sorts tasks on those two dimensions:

For leaders, the box that matters most is important but not urgent: developing people, planning, building relationships, fixing a recurring problem at its root. Nothing forces these tasks onto your calendar, so they get crowded out unless you book time for them. Much of the urgent work that lands on a manager’s desk can go to someone else, which is also a development opportunity for them.

A practical way to use it: at the start of each week, list everything competing for your time and sort it into the four boxes. Then block time for the top two or three important but not urgent items before the week fills up.

The matrix also makes saying no easier. When someone asks for your time, you can place the request in a box and explain your answer: “This is important, so let’s book it for Thursday” or “Priya owns this now, so please go to her first.” A clear reason is easier to accept than a vague “I’m too busy”.

Protect time for deep work

Cal Newport defines deep work as “the act of focusing without distraction on a cognitively demanding task”. His argument is that this kind of work is becoming more valuable and rarer at the same time. Strategies he describes include time blocking, fixed-schedule productivity (setting a firm end to the working day and fitting work inside it) and depth rituals.

Leaders cannot disappear for days, but most can protect some focused time:

• Block two or three 90-minute slots a week for thinking work and treat them like meetings with an important client.
• Turn off notifications and close email during those slots.
• Tell your team when you are in focus time and how to reach you for anything urgent.
• Batch shallow tasks such as approvals and routine emails into set times.

Manage energy, not only time

Tony Schwartz and Catherine McCarthy’s Harvard Business Review article “Manage Your Energy, Not Your Time” argues that time is fixed but energy can be renewed. They describe four sources: body, emotions, mind and spirit (a sense of meaning and purpose). Their suggestions include taking regular breaks, reframing setbacks instead of slipping into a victim mindset, cutting digital distraction and making time for work that feels meaningful. They report that participants in an energy management programme at Wachovia bank outperformed a control group on financial measures, though the article gives limited detail on the study.

For leaders, the practical step is to match work to energy. Put your hardest thinking at the time of day you are sharpest, and put routine tasks in your low-energy periods.

A worked example

An example (illustration only). Arjun runs operations for a growing online retailer and manages four team leads. His week is wall-to-wall meetings and he does planning at night. He sorts his work into the Eisenhower matrix and finds that the quarterly capacity plan and two team leads’ development plans have been sitting in “important, not urgent” for six weeks. He also finds that he personally approves every refund above a low threshold, which belongs in “urgent, not important”.

He makes three changes. He raises the refund approval threshold and hands most approvals to a team lead. He blocks Tuesday and Thursday mornings from 9 to 10:30 for planning, with notifications off. And he moves his routine email to a 4pm slot, when he knows his energy dips. Within a month the capacity plan is done and he has stopped working evenings.

Common mistakes

• Treating every request as urgent. Urgency is often someone else’s priority.
• Not protecting focus blocks. If you move them for any meeting, they disappear.
• Hoarding tasks. Keeping work you could delegate slows you and your team’s growth.
• Ignoring energy. Pushing through long stretches without breaks lowers the quality of your decisions.
• Over-engineering the system. A weekly sort and a few protected blocks beat a complex app you stop using.
• Modelling overwork. Late-night emails from a manager set expectations for the team, whatever you say.

When these tools help and when they do not

These tools help when you are busy but not making progress on what matters, when your team waits on you for decisions, or when you feel constantly behind. They help less when the real problem is too much work for the team as a whole. Then the answer is a conversation with your own manager about priorities, resources or deadlines.

Start with one change this week: sort your tasks into the four boxes and protect one block of focus time. Add more once that habit holds.