Protect your time

Leadership is about people, so the everyday job mostly means doing things with other people: one-on-ones, interviews with candidates, spontaneous meetings. It can get busy to the point that you may spend days in the company of other people. While there isn't anything intrinsically wrong with spending work time with your teams, a balance is still necessary. You may go on for days or weeks before realising that you're always running. It's too busy, but bad busy. Being so busy may feel like an accomplishment. After all, you're always doing relevant work; you have the interest of your team at heart, so what's wrong with it?

Well, you are ignoring yourself. While I stand by the point that good leadership is servant leadership that puts people first, you can't overdo it. There are many problems ignoring yourself may bring about:

• Your technical skills stagnate

  Going from one meeting to another means you are in operational mode. You jump from one topic to another. From one one-on-one to the next. You learn lots of new things here and there, but there is no breakthrough development in your technical growth. If you are a developer yourself, you may miss writing code. Moreover, technology evolves fast, and you never get around to getting your hands dirty with what your teams are doing. If you are always in the company of other people, you don't have the time for that anymore.

• You lose sight of the big picture

  Let me bring back the car metaphor. If you are driving a car, you lose some details of the road. You get a sense of how to get from A to B, you could probably do it again. The bigger the team, the more complicated it gets. You need the time to leave the road and look at all the cars from afar. Sometimes, you find interesting patterns. You can't do any deep thinking if you are always in the company of other people.

To mitigate these problems, you need to protect your time. In my experience, being as systematic as possible is key. I literally protect my calendar from my own commitments. Here is what works for me:

• I block 2 slots of 4 hours (a day per week) in my calendar. Most calendars have a "working hours" feature. I use that.
• I never make exceptions, and never schedule any occasional meetings during these blocks.
• I enjoy my "free time".

However you create your "free time", it's crucial that you actually use it productively. A great way of doing so is to come up with a project that covers personal innovation, big picture, and building. This project has to be pertinent to your job. My favourite projects are small utilities to improve neglected parts of the development workflow. I love the multiplying effect that such an initiative can have on the teams.

I've been protecting my time since I first started leading. I must warn you: it's harder than it seems. In practice, it's way too easy to end up spending months without any personal time. It happened to me more than once, and knowing that this may happen again didn't seem to help. That's why I'm advocating for hard rules. Budget your time, block your calendar, and stick to your plan. You'll thank yourself later.