The Number One KEY to Achieving the Impact You Want as a Humanitarian and Development Leader

Sometimes the simplest things can be the key to making the most of our time.

The problem is we often become so busy as humanitarian and international development leaders we can forget these simple things.  And that leads us to just surviving and doing what we can to get things done.

This episode delves into a crucial lesson from Steve Jobs: the importance of deciding what not to do, which can help you focus on what truly drives your goals forward.

By listening to this 7 minute episode, you will learn how to:

• Identify and eliminate time-wasting activities that detract from your leadership impact.
• Use a time diary to gain awareness of your daily habits and their effectiveness.
• Align your time management strategies with your leadership goals for greater productivity and fulfillment.

Tune in now to discover how to regain control of your time and enhance your impact as a leader!

WHAT IS YOUR LEADERSHIP STYLE? QUIZ

Want to know how to lead better?  It starts by understanding your leadership style.   To find out yours, take my free quiz “What Is Your Leadership Style” - you’ll immediately find out your default style, how it may be impacting your team and a few practical ways to become an even better leader.  Just click on the link fill out your quiz and click submit.

FULL TRANSCRIPT:

How to stay on track to achieving your goals in today's quick quote, episode.

Welcome to The Modern Humanitarian and Development Leader podcast, the podcast, helping humanitarian and development supervisors make a greater impact by taking control of your time, leading more inclusively and empowering your team all the while avoiding stress, burnout, and overwhelm. I'm your host, leadership coach and former aid worker, Torrey Peace.

Are you ready? Let's get started.

Hello, my aspiring modern humanitarian and development leaders. I hope you're having a wonderful week. And today we're going to be talking more on time management. And in particular, this episode was inspired by the quote by the late Steve Jobs, who was one of the founders, of course of Apple. And he said, "deciding what not to do. Is as important as deciding what to do." Once again. "Deciding what not to do. Is as important as deciding what to do."

And he actually said this quote around when he returned to apple after taking a break in 1997, when he cut the product line by 70%. And this actually led to apple being more focused on fewer things. So they were able to get really good at those things and make more of an impact. And of course, that led to more profitability, more growth.

So how might this apply in our work and humanitarian and development? Well, we make choices every day, whether we know it or not on how we spend our time, we are constantly making these choices. And most of them, we are not even fully aware. We probably are doing them subconsciously. And a lot of it has to do also with a pattern of way of working, maybe how we're feeling at the time, our energy level, our habits.

For example, if you have the habit of getting to the office or getting to your computer and starting to read email for the first hour. That's something that you're choosing to do that will produce a certain result, but it's something that I think is a very good thing to be aware of because in order to be able to decide more consciously how we use our time or how we don't, we need to first be aware of how we are using it now.

And this is why I have my students for the course "Becoming the Modern, Humanitarian and Development Leader" start with a time diary. And just like a food diary where the reason that a dietician or nutritionist would have you write down all the things you're eating throughout your day is because a lot of times we go through our day, we might not even be aware of what we're eating. Uh, it could be something like a snack that we grab and we just do it out of habit. But we don't realize that we do it until we decide consciously to write it down and to become aware of it.

And it's the same with how we use our time. So I suggest picking an average day, not a day where you have a donor visit or, something abnormal, but an average day for you. And just going through your day and writing through what are you doing? How are you using your time? I even did this last week for myself and it is such a powerful thing to do, even though it's so simple.

You probably think, oh, of course I know how I'm using my time, but I'm always surprised by first of all, how I'm using my time, and then I ask myself how much of an impact is each of these things making? So after I go through my list of how I use my day, I then can decide what am I doing

that's leading me to make a better impact or where I want to go? And what am I doing that's maybe not? Deciding what not to do in the future or how not to use my time as much. And of course, yeah. Once again, that begins with the awareness. It also requires that you understand where you're going.

Right? So that's why in my course, I have my students do leadership impact goals. So they understand what is the impact that they want to create as a leader. So that you can answer that question how am I using my time? Is it making an impact? Is it leading me to my goal or not? And the way you will know if you're going to achieve your goal or not, which I've talked about in the past, is basically you take the way you used your time and you just compound it over the next year. And if you used your time, this way every day for the next year, would it produce the impact that you want?

Would it lead you to achieving your goal? That is a very powerful question to ask yourself. Because like I also say you can always be more efficient in how you use your time. Of course, we're never going to be able to eliminate meetings or completely, stop doing certain things that maybe we would rather not to, or that keep us busy, but not productive.

However, we can start to shift our time more so that we can delegate some of these things to others or start to tip the balance more so that more of our time is going towards these higher impact activities. So if this interests you and you want to continue to learn about how to have a more productive week, how to make more impact and have a more proactive and a high-performance team then stay tuned on Monday because we will continue to talk about high performance syndrome, which I mentioned that last Monday and the common thoughts and ways of leading and working that lead us to being busy, but not productive things that are so common that we don't even realize that we're doing them. All right until then keep evolving.​

Are you the type of leader that tells others what to do? Or do you let them figure it out for themselves? Understanding your leadership style is the first step to deciding what's working for you and what's not. To find out your leadership style, take my free quiz "what is your leadership style?" You'll immediately find out your default style, how it may be impacting your team, and a few practical ways to become an even better leader.

Just click on the link in the show notes, www.aidforaidworkers.com/quiz fill out your quiz and click submit. So what are you waiting for? Go to www.aidforaidworkers.com/quiz and discover your leadership style now. Your team will thank you for it!