STOP Doing This So You Can Gain Control of Your Time as a Humanitarian and International Development Leader

Are you tired of feeling like your time isn’t your own?

You are not alone.  Between being assigned last minute proposals, attending tons of meetings and various HQ initiatives you may feel you don't own your time.  But there are some ways you can gain more control over it, and that's what you'll learn in today's episode!

By tuning in, you’ll discover:

• What's making you feel you have no control over your time 
• Why it's important to treat your own schedule with the same respect you give others.
• Strategies on how to take control of your time so you can have less work and more impact

Don’t miss out on the opportunity to transform your approach to time management—hit play now to find out how!

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:

Learn how your own decision-making may be the reason why you have no control over your time and this 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 leader. I hope you're having a wonderful week. In today's episode you're going to learn: why you feel you have no control over your time, one thing you may be doing that is destroying your ability to manage your time effectively and strategies on how to take control over your time so you can also broaden your impact.

So this is part of a series I've been doing over the last few weeks on what I call high performance syndrome. And if you don't understand what I'm talking about,

please go back to episode 33 and you will find out what that means. But just in summary high-performance syndrome is basically a way of working and thinking that is not helping us as leaders. And it comes from good intentions. We want to be high-performers. But the way that we are leading in traditional senses is actually creating the opposite.

It's creating lower impact and lower performance. But I'm going to show you how to become a true high performer. And some of that has to do with what I've already touched in previous episodes. But today we're going to focus on the idea of, I have no control over my time. Which is a very common high-performance syndrome thought, which I hear a lot from aid worker or humanitarian and development supervisors. So when we believe that, because this is a belief I have no control over my time.

It is not a fact. We can not prove that in court of law. So when we believe we have no control over our time. We become a victim to it instead because we are more likely to accept this, uh, as just the way things are and not look for ways to take control. So even if you're in an environment where you are told what to do, where you don't have a lot of freedom in terms of what you work on. If you believe that you just have no control over your time. Then you will not look for ways out or the small ways that you can make progress and take control. But most of us are probably in a place where it's kind of in between. Right?

Where we are occasionally told what to do whether it's from a supervisor who needs help with something, or we are told to attend a meeting that we were not expecting. Or to work on a proposal. Or to participate in a headquarter initiative that we had no idea was coming and now is suddenly filling up a lot of our time. These are the types of things that we often feel like, are being told to us.

And so we don't have control over. But another major reason that we don't feel that we have control over our time is something that we do have more control over, and that is also super common. And that is that we don't respect our own time.

And so this is what we're going to focus on today. And what I mean by, we don't respect our own time, is we don't respect our time to ourselves. The time that we set aside for working on something like focused or work that requires concentration, such as a strategy or a budget or a donor proposal.

And if you haven't picked up on this already, these are the types of meetings that we are meeting only with ourselves, to work on something, we have it in our calendar, but then someone comes to us or they message us and, or they knock on our door or they just come to our desk and they ask if we are busy during that time that we've already set aside for focused or planning work.

And we say, no.

But we really are. We have already scheduled a meeting with ourselves. So why do we not respect that meeting with ourselves? Why do we cancel ourselves?

This is a very common thing that I see supervisors, or leaders don't respect their own time. That we think that other people's priorities are more important than our own. We feel guilty because we are only meeting with ourselves and that's not important. That we can always push that work that we have to do into after hours, right? Are you resonating with us?

Does this sound familiar? So today I'm going to focus on this particular area because I see it as so common. And yet, if you are able to overcome this, you will gain back time,

you will do higher quality work and you will become a true high performer.

So one thing, when I, when I think about this, I've talked to many, many leaders about this idea. Of scheduling over their own time, but one particular example that comes to mind is when I was doing some consulting work for an organization. And they brought me in to do consulting to look at why they were always feeling over worked and overwhelmed and busy. And yet they felt like they could be more productive. So, what was really interesting is as I was interviewing each of them about their own perspective on this issue, I saw a pattern. And the pattern was the team was using a joint calendar.

They were using a calendar that you could go and see other people's calendars and when they were busy and when they were not. And basically. They were looking at their teammates' calendars and finding time that they saw that they were working on something which required focus like a report. Or like research, something like that. And they were asking to schedule over that, right?

So I go into your calendar. I see that you have a meeting with yourself. That you're working on a report. It's just you. And so I ask you, can I schedule over that time? I need to meet with you about something. And the person would say, yes, and vice versa. If somebody came to them and they already had scheduled and concentrated, focused time by themselves. And they had that in their calendar, but someone asked if they were busy during that time, they would say, no, I'm not busy.

Yeah. We can meet during that time. And what was happening was because of that they were pushing all of their really focused, important work either into long working hours or they weren't able to do it. And so the quality of the work was suffering. They were not able to be high performers. Which is what they want it. So I think it is a really important thing because I'm sure you're doing this in some way.

So the question is what would help you to protect your own time more and not allow yourself or others to schedule over it? Right? And I'm assuming here that you plan your week and you plan this time where you're going to be working on on these types of activities.

Here are a few ideas. One is, to schedule that time into a calendar as if you're in a meeting. And

if somebody has access to your calendar, make it look the same as if you were meeting with someone externally, if you use teams or one of these notification systems, you can just put busy during that time, right? So it looks like you are actually in a meeting, which you are just with yourself.

Another thing that I used to do was to try and meet somewhere with myself. So in other words, I would schedule something outside the office. If you have that luxury, if you're working from home, this might not be an issue. But, uh, I remember because I worked in an open floor layout in my office, it would be very distracting sometimes. I would basically schedule a meeting with myself in the coffee shop or in another place where I knew I could get more concentrated, focused work done, I would not be interrupted. And I wouldn't feel guilty if somebody came to me because. Well, no one was coming to me. But also because no one would know that I'm meeting with myself.

At the same time, it also is great to be able to set an example for others. I'm aware of a leader right now who schedules in her calendar time meeting with herself and her team knows it and she respects that time and they do too. And so if you set that example, then they're also more likely to feel like they can do the same thing. Okay. So we have so far put that time in the calendar as a meeting the same as you would with anyone else.

So it looks the same externally. Maybe find, or do your meeting time with yourself in another location or somewhere where you know you won't be disturbed. , just like you would, if you were meeting another person, close your door, whatever you need to do. Number three, treat that time as you would as if you were meeting with someone really important, right?

Someone you think is very important. Now everyone should be. Seen as important, but sometimes. We're less likely to cancel a meeting with our supervisor or someone more senior than us than someone who is below us on the org chart. Unfortunately, that's just kind of the way it is. So if that's you, if you feel that way Then treat this meeting time as if you're meeting with the CEO of your organization, for example. And so give yourself the same respect and only schedule over it

If you feel you have to after you've looked at all your other options. So if you had a meeting with a CEO of your organization and someone came and asked you, are you busy? You're going to say yes right? And if they said, well, we really need to meet during this time, which by the way, if you say you're busy, they're going to find another option.

They're probably not going to keep asking you, are you sure you're busy? But if you say you're busy and they say, well, But we really need to meet during this time. , if you had a meeting with the CEO, you probably would just keep saying no. Right? You would defend that time. But if you really had to, maybe you would look for an alternative option of rescheduling or sending someone else to whatever meeting that they want you to go to or whatever you would look for other options.

So that's what I'm encouraging you to do. Not just to say yes when someone asks. If you're busy in a meeting with yourself, treat that time as if you actually are meeting with someone important because you are.

The fourth idea is to have an accountability partner and I know this sounds kind of ironic because you're supposed to be meeting with yourself, but what I mean is maybe meet with them once a week and ask each other: did you respect your own time? Hold each other accountable for respecting your own time when you've had a meeting with yourself did you schedule over it or did you actually, defend that time as much as you could?

Now some of you might be thinking, well, that's unrealistic. I can't schedule all this time for focused work by myself. That's not what I'm talking about. What I see is leaders who schedule reasonable amounts of time to work on their own on concentrated, focused work. You know, who, you know who you are. And somebody comes to them and then they schedule over it. So this is not something where you regularly a full day where you're meeting on your own. This is something where a few hours a week you have enough time to get those really important tasks done. So by respecting your own time, you will start to take control over it. And you will also be able to focus more on higher impact and higher value activities. And that means you will also start working less hours. You don't have to push the extra work into after hours.

You will have a lighter workload and you will be able to probably feel less stressed and overwhelmed.

And the other thing is sometimes we feel like we're hurting someone else or we're letting someone else down by telling them that no, we can't meet with them at that time that they asked. But I would challenge you to think that actually a lot of times what you're doing is you're also teaching this other person, how to respect your own time and maybe they will in turn respect more of their own.

So that is how to start to take control of your time and overcome this high-performance syndrome thought. Have a great week and until then keep evolving bye for now.

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!