An Executive Time Management System

When I started working as an executive it became apparent that the skills I learned as an engineer were enough to get me the job, but I would need to work on different skills in order to stay. One of the hardest problems was nothing I haven’t heard of before: time management. I joined JP Morgan’s Checkout group as an Engineer and in less than a year became the Director of Frontend Engineering, Design, and UX Research. In short, I really did it to myself this time. I was grateful for this major growth opportunity but wasn’t sure how I would measure up to the challenge. Eventually, my tech lead work partner Sean Cady casually mentioned how I should think about “where best to spend your Hova-Bucks”. You only have so many “Bucks” (aka “time”), so focusing on what you spend your time on was paramount. In theory, this is cake. After all, just spend the time on important things! It’s all fun and games until you have a million projects and each has a stakeholder sending petty emails (…and CC-ing your boss). Adding to the tragedy of it all, no matter how hard you try to bend space and time you can not manifest more workable hours in a day. Everyone is vying for your time so you have to actively communicate what you are working on and why with what little time you do have.

My life usually gets better if I just listen to Sean. After he started mentioning “Hova-Bucks” in relation to time, i’ve been absolutely systemic about what I spend my time on and why. As of right now I have landed on what I’m calling the “Hova Executive Time Management System”. This system embraces two strategies:

1. Stack ranking
2. Categorizing tasks

Strategy 1: Stack Ranking

When you’re in meetings for 99.99% of your day and only have time to take notes, it all adds up fast. The following issues pop up:

1. One big meeting can (and should) completely change your prioritizations. Because of this, reprioritizing tasks needs to be as frictionless as possible so the majority of your brain power goes into the stack ranking of tasks and is not wasted on how you physically reprioritize the list order.
2. A LOT of tasks will inevitably be rolled over day after day because they are (and this is important) not as urgent or important as other things.
3. WHAT IF EVERYTHING IS URGENT AND ALSO IMPORTANT? As Patrick M. Lencioni says: “when everything is important, nothing is”. When you find yourself caught between stakeholders that all have full workloads you will need to delegate and manage expectations.

Hints that a task has higher priority in the stack rank include:

1. Its blast radius has a high cost. For example: a devastating bug that has stopped production in its tracks or a task for a project that has the potential to make the highest amount of revenue. Determine this by metrics, not by gut alone. Be very clear and consistent about what is the highest priority in this bucket. The more you flip flop on this the more chaos ensues for your team.
2. It will unblock your team so they can get back to doing what they need to do. As a manager you are no longer working on the 1 person contribution scale for yourself, but instead for entire departments. There is nothing worse than a group not knowing what their next steps are, so the sooner you unblock and create clarity the better.
3. It can not be delegated and it’s something only you can do. For example, a big decision about product direction.

Once you know what your stack ranked tasks are, there are a few strategies to know what to do next. The Eisenhower Matrix (Importance vs Urgency) is a classic:

This strategy is pretty good but I’ve formed a big opinion to amend this: The most important thing is that important and urgent things get done, not that you are the one that did them. That important + urgent box fills up FAST. I’ve found myself looking into logic like this:

As a manager you need to scale yourself and hoarding all of the important + urgent tasks will not serve you long term because:

1. There is (and I cannot emphasize this enough) not enough time in a day. The last thing you want to have happen is to let your team down because you didn’t raise your hand for help when you were over served things to do.
2. Hoarding all the tasks takes growth opportunities away from your team. I said what I said. Delegating is an investment in the team to not have you as a bottleneck. Additionally, the more important tasks your reports take on, the more they learn. The more they learn about important tasks, the more value they add to the business. The more value they add to the business the better positioned they are during annual reviews. This is “the circle of life” of the corporate world.

Next time you have several important and urgent tasks at the top of your stack rank, think about delegating and empowering instead of hoarding. Don’t be that person.

Strategy 2: Categorizing tasks

Working in a big corporate company means you are working on tasks that exist on many different timelines. You have your team’s roadmap, the company as a whole’s roadmap, other internal team roadmaps, how long things take in procurement when getting 3rd party software, and probably more. OoOoOoh the many types of tasks you’ll find.

I’ve found that tasks can usually be categorized into the following buckets:

1. Day-to-day — a list of tasks that float in and out of your daily life. These will never end, and they need to be stack ranked based on business and team needs. Examples include reviewing things to give feedback, updating the roadmap with new info, and general existential screaming.
2. Inter team and urgent tasks — Tasks that you need to check in on almost every day to make sure that they get taken care of regardless of what else is going on. Examples include: getting international translations from the i18n team and sending an offer to a candidate.
3. …Procurement : ( — this is on it’s own timeline. It’s no one’s fault, the cross team checks and contracts that are needed to be signed to onboard new software are going to take what they’re going to take. Sometimes this means a year of “hurry up and wait”.
4. Life stuff — Life related tasks should exist outside of the work stack rank because (and this is true) you are allowed to exist outside of work. Examples include functional adult tasks like ordering cat food and sorting your mail.

Enter: The Hova Executive Time Management System v1.0.0

I went through a really tough period of my life where my memory was not great and I realized that I needed to quantify how to be a functional person. This has lead me to creating systems for everything and some serious introspection about how my mind works. Physically writing things out on paper helps me remember things easier, but you can also list out your tasks in Figma (see free community File here) or whatever medium you want.

The “Hova Executive Time Management System” sections are as follows:

Visual representation of the “Hova Executive Time Management System”

1. The “Nag List” — these are tasks that you must shamelessly nag into fruition. They could be inter team tasks like getting translations or more urgent ones like sending an offer to a candidate. Every day I check these tasks to contact people for help and I give updates to people who need to be kept in the loop. The “Nag List” is a fan favorite on my team. When I tell people “it’s on the nag list, now” they know it will get taken care of asap. They will get updates constantly because following up is one of my love languages.
2. Procurement — These tasks are for the very long term procurement contracts that are a “hurry up and wait” situation. I also check these with the same cadence as the “nag list” but it’s nice to see them all gathered in one place to keep my mind wrapped around it. It’s easy to forget what’s going on when it takes a year or so to procure a new software contract.
3. The “Stack Rank” — this is for all other work related tasks. I do a stack rank exercise every morning and after every important meeting to make sure I’m working on the highest priority thing for the team and business. Highest priority things are usually tasks that only I can do (ex: charting the course so we can steer the ship) and things that unblock others. If you do write things on actual paper, I highly recommend using sticky notes for your stack rank list so you can re order them based on the ever changing prioritization easily.
4. “Life stuff” — self explanatory. This is ideally a list of 1–3 things that I need to do to be a functional human being outside of work. These tasks need to get done that day. More long term life tasks go on my whiteboard and i’ll probably write another article about that system. (Yes, always more systems)

Doing the introspection and task analysis work to create this system has been the key to any success I have this year. I’m no longer drowning, just constantly adjusting and vibing in the chaos.

Materials Used

I’ve been experimenting with the best tools for this and so far have landed on:

1. Full stick sticky notes. They stick better than regular sticky notes and you can cut them in half for the stack rank section easier. I re arrange the stack rank so much that regular sticky notes will loose their stick too quickly.
2. Bigger sticky notes for the “nag list”. I like having the nag list be a bit larger because there tends to be a lot on there.
3. Dumb lined note pads to hold all the sticky notes as you run from meeting to meeting.

Conclusion / TLDR;

Time management is hard, and it’s one of the biggest challenges of executive level work. No one has it all figured out, but introspection and trying your best to create systems that work for you is a great start. There are many different types of tasks, so categorizing them and treating them accordingly is your “management happy path”. When in doubt, lean on stack ranking and empowering your team. You got this.