Taming Your Time Wasters

In research recently reported in the Harvard Business Review, a study of how leaders spend their time showed they spend only 9% of their time interacting with front line employees. While we as leaders know how critical our people are to the success of our organization, it's easy to get wrapped up in all of the other responsibilities we're tasked with. Meetings, customers, projects and some many other priorities compete for our time. 

How do we carve time out to focus on our employees? Here's some suggestions on taming the things that tie us up and keep us away from our employees.

• Say no at least three times a day to tasks that don’t add value.

• Avoid your biggest time-wasting task for 30 days.

• Designate certain tasks to certain times of day.

• Prioritize important work over other tasks.