The Playbook for Leading At Your Best: Prioritization and Time + Energy Management

Rippleworks Leaders Studio convenes 80+ social ventures on a regular basis to learn practical, actionable steps they can take to preserve their time and energy to ensure they are leading at their best.

On a Monday morning in 2017, Hector Padilla opened his laptop, looked at his calendar, and his eyes filled with tears.

“I felt completely powerless,” Hector said. “My schedule was completely full, I wouldn’t even have time for lunch most days. It was very early Monday morning, and I was already tired. I already wanted it to be the weekend.”

Hector Padilla is a leading CTO who has built and managed engineering teams at top companies including Zynga, Wizeline, and Playco, and he was feeling the painful realities of being a senior leader of a fast-moving engineering team at a fast-moving company. To be at his best, Hector knew he had to make real changes.

Hector isn’t alone. Leaders of social ventures around the world struggle with the same tension between managing their workload and taking care of themselves every day. Helping these leaders is among the most valuable ways to help social ventures thrive. Rippleworks recently ran a month-long workshop series where 80+ social venture leaders met weekly to work together to learn practical, actionable steps they can take to preserve their time and energy to ensure they are leading at their best.

The series is part of Rippleworks’ Leaders Studio, which provides expert-led learning programs designed specifically for social venture leaders. Rippleworks partners with leading industry executives to run interactive, results-driven learning programs where social venture leaders gain the critical skills they need to deliver impact at scale.

In this recent series, participants — who ranged from COOs to Program Directors to Heads of People — went through a series of workshops facilitated by Hector, who in addition to being a full-time CTO also serves as a leadership coach. Hector has worked with 100+ leaders around the world, including in Japan, Vietnam, the Netherlands, Mexico, Canada, and the US.

Hector leveraged his 20+ years of startup leadership to share practical learnings for how leaders can go from moments like his dreaded Monday in 2017 to consistently being and feeling at their best. The workshop series focused on two critical areas that leaders need to get right: prioritization and managing your energy and time.

Prioritization

As Hector reminded participants in the workshop, “prioritization is self care.” Without clear prioritization, everything on your to-do list can feel important, urgent, and time sensitive.

Four important steps toward prioritization

1. Be clear on your purpose. Your priorities should be connected to a clear understanding of your company-level objectives, and as a leader, it is your job to connect and prioritize your team’s work towards the bigger picture. Using Simon Sinek’s Golden Circle Why/What/How framework, leaders need to understand the “Why” and use that to guide the “What,” which tends to comprise the bulk of what leaders should be thinking about (What is your team supposed to be working on? What should the results be?) If you’re spending a lot of time on the “How,” you are likely micromanaging. Let the team come up with the “How.”
2. Have clear, time-bound goals. More general, longer-term goals don’t help you know what you need to prioritize right now — but having a clear picture of what you need to accomplish and by when does. Align yourself and your team using tools like OKRs, KPIs, or MBOs, and then track your progress against those time-bound goals to help you see where you need to make adjustments in your prioritization.
3. Know your role as a leader. As a leader, your job is to direct an orchestra — conducting musicians while not necessarily playing an instrument yourself. In turn, if you make yourself indispensable, you are not succeeding as a leader. Your role is to enable others, and part of that is giving away your legos and supporting others to take on more responsibilities. And as you support your team, you likely will have to be both strategic and tactical, which can be challenging and exhausting — so design your workflow and calendar to accommodate this. “I create time for me to be in ‘manager time’ and ‘maker time,’” Hector shared. “My team knows that in the morning, I’m in leadership mode and in a strategic mental mode. But in the afternoons, I’m in ‘get stuff done’ mode.”
4. Have a practice. In order to effectively prioritize, leaders need to regularly reflect on how things are faring, and adjust accordingly. Hector shared practices and lessons learned from agile software development, where teams have regular retrospectives to reflect on 3 questions: What went right/wrong? What do we need to more/less of? What do we need to start/stop doing? Commit to asking yourself these questions at the end of every week, and make adjustments based on your honest reflections.

Start taking action today. As part of the workshop, participants made specific commitments for what they wanted to start doing differently right away to better prioritize. Examples include:

1. Using your purpose and your clear “Why,” start your week by listing your Top 5 priorities every week or month.
2. Make sure self-care is one of those Top 5 priorities. Build it into your calendar (eg: schedule time to go for a swim).
3. End your week with a retrospective. What went right/wrong? What do I need to do more/less of? What do I need to start/stop doing? Do it with yourself. Then, do it with your team.

Managing Your Energy And Time

Hector had workshop participants reflect on a pointed question: “Are you going to finish this week energized? Or are you going to finish this week drained?”

More often than not, busy leaders leave each week more drained than energized, which can lead to inevitable burnout. Many social venture leaders attending the workshops related to Hector’s story of already feeling exhausted when they look at their weekly calendars on Monday mornings.

So, what specific steps can leaders take to leave each week more energized than drained?

Managing Energy

1. Understand your current energy engagement. An energy engagement map (popularized by the bestselling book “Designing Your Life”) is a helpful tool to get a detailed understanding of how energizing or draining our work can be, and why. The energy engagement map requires you to list your most common, time-consuming activities, and chart them on a graph based on whether they are more energizing or draining.
2. Rebalance your energy. A better understanding of your current energy engagement then allows you to take specific actions to increase your overall energy. Examples include:

Change the environment. Combine a draining activity with an energizing one (example: take a call while going for a walk).

Sandwich activities. Schedule a more draining activity between two energizing activities.

Delegate. Delegate a draining activity to someone. Is your draining activity potentially energizing to someone else on your team?

Reframe. Reframing is about dealing with a situation that may not change, and changing your relationship to it. Find and connect the activity to your “Why.”

Managing Time

1. Block time for “flow.” A state of “flow” occurs when we are “in the zone” and feeling fully immersed in energized focus and full enjoyment in the activity. We are at our best when we are in “flow” — but this takes intentional time and space. So, as you recognize where and when in your work you tend to be in a state of “flow,” make sure your calendar has time blocked off for it. Inspire yourself towards this by listening to Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s TED Talk on the state of “flow.”
2. Combine your to-do list and your calendar. If you need to get something done, create the space by putting it on your calendar — otherwise, it will be difficult to find the time to get those items done.
3. Declare bankruptcy — and keep that mindset going. When his calendar was getting too out of hand, Hector declared “calendar bankruptcy,” and cleared his calendar of his meetings by messaging his team, “I realized that my calendar is too full, and in order to be useful for all of you, I need to clear up my calendar. So, I am going to decline all existing meetings, but please re-invite me if my participation is important.” Once clearing your calendar of meetings where your participation isn’t crucial, ask your team to include you when your input is required to make a decision. Otherwise, ask to be updated by emails or reports.
4. Have speedy meetings. Google Calendar and other tools have “speedy meeting” settings, which allows you to default “speedy” meetings (25 minutes instead of 30 minutes; 50 minutes instead of 60). Especially in the time of back-to-back video conference meetings, those extra few minutes between meetings can allow you to stretch and fend off that dreaded Zoom fatigue.

Start taking action today. As part of the workshop, participants made specific commitments for what they wanted to start doing differently right away to manage energy and time. Examples include:

1. Rebalance energy by mixing in fresh air and outdoor walks, especially around more draining activities. Sandwich draining activities with more energizing activities.
2. Block time every week for a “no meetings” half-day or full-day. Let your team know the intention behind this space, and ask that they honor it (and encourage them to do the same!).
3. Do the energy engagement map with teammates to understand where people are energized and drained, and then compare and contrast. See where there are mutually beneficial opportunities for delegation.