Tips for Juggling Balls While Keeping Your Sanity
By Dr. Barrett Mosbacker
June 18, 2022
Leadership is a juggling act. Leaders have many balls in the air: emails, phone calls, meetings, events to lead and attend, strategic initiatives and projects to move forward, reports to write, presentations to prepare and deliver, conferences to attend, personnel reviews and other HR issues to address, policy review and development, board development and relationships to manage, financial decisions to make, parent and student issues to address, and much more. Then there are responsibilities to our family, church, and civic organizations, personal finances to manage, home and vehicle maintenance, household chores, vacations to plan, and so on.
It is easy to be overwhelmed juggling so many responsibilities. We are always in danger of dropping one or more balls, which only adds to stress in our lives.
The good news is that there are simple ways to keep the balls in the air without being constantly stressed.
1. Prioritize the Important Over the Urgent
In his best-selling book The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, Steven Covey encourages us to focus on the important over the non-important and defines the difference between the urgent and the important.
Urgent matters are usually visible. They press on us; they insist on action. They’re often popular with others. They’re usually right in front of us. And often they are pleasant, easy, fun to do. But so often they are unimportant!
Importance, on the other hand, has to do with results. If something is important, it contributes to your mission, your values, your high-priority goals. We react to urgent matters. Important matters that are not urgent require more initiative, more proactivity. We must act to seize opportunity, to make things happen.1
The Eisenhower Matrix — also known as the Urgent-Important Matrix, and rooted in Eisenhower’s own approach to decision-making — is a tool Covey employed to help differentiate the important from the non-important. It helps us focus the bulk of our time and energy on the important and less time and energy on the preventable urgent.
“To paraphrase Peter Drucker,” writes Covey, “effective people are not problem-minded; they’re opportunity-minded. They feed opportunities and starve problems. They think preventively. They have … crises and emergencies requiring our immediate attention, but the number is comparatively small.”2 In other words, effective people focus on the important and minimize the number of urgent matters that can distract them. They get the most important things done because they have fewer distractions.
Email is a prime example of how the urgent can crowd out the important. Email provides a way for others to add to our to-do list and for us to add to theirs. Making matters worse, there is a growing expectation of an immediate response to an email. And because we get a dopamine fix when checking email, we are drawn to it like a moth to a flame. Texting and instant communication platforms like Slack make the situation even worse. We end up spending too much time processing emails. Research confirms the scale of the problem: the average professional spends twenty-eight percent of the workday reading and answering email — for the average full-time worker in America, that amounts to a staggering 2.6 hours spent and one hundred twenty messages received per day.3
Dealing with email and other supposedly urgent things makes us feel like we are being productive, but more often than not, we are being productive with relatively unimportant things. We spend hours of our lives processing email and responding to text messages rather than focusing on something that will substantially move our schools’ mission forward. To avoid this problem, we must be conscious of differentiating the important from the urgent and devote ourselves to focusing on the former rather than the latter.
2. Create a Strategic Priorities List
The easiest way to focus on what is important is to do what is natural for most of us — keep a list. I have divided my work responsibilities and projects into two broad areas: Strategic Priorities and Work. The items under Strategic Priorities are essential for moving our mission forward, putting our core values into practice, and identifying the highest priorities for the coming school year. The particulars of one’s list will vary, but what matters is that projects are separated into the important — Strategic Priorities — and the less important — Work. Everything on such a list is of some importance. The difference between the two categories is that the Strategic Priorities list outlines the initiatives to which one devotes most of one’s time and energy. The other Work items will not be ignored; they are addressed continuously during the week, but only after the bulk of one’s time and energy has been devoted to strategic priorities.
3. Block Your Calendar for Strategic Priorities
Having a list is not the same as having the time to work on it. We will face numerous people and things vying for our attention during any given day, most of which fall into the not-important half of the matrix. To guard against this ever-present danger, it is essential to schedule time devoted exclusively to our most strategically important projects. Everyone’s circumstances will differ; therefore, one’s ability to carve out time will also vary. Still, most of us have enough control of our schedules to block off time for our most important projects. Because I am a morning person, I schedule early mornings for two things — personal devotions and time to work on strategic projects. I also schedule time for exercise at the end of my regular workday. I pre-block these times for the entire year. My executive assistant knows not to schedule meetings during these times unless the matter is both important and urgent.
4. Do a Weekly Review
I strongly recommend setting aside time each week to conduct what is called a Weekly Review. My Weekly Review is scheduled for every Friday morning. I spend this time reviewing my projects, that week’s upcoming events, upcoming events over the next two to three weeks, and clearing out my email and other items. This helps me identify and schedule what I need to focus on in the week ahead. A Weekly Review need not be lengthy; thirty minutes is typically sufficient to review projects, assess priorities, and prepare for the coming week.
5. Identify the Top Two or Three Priorities for Each Day
This is a simple process. At the end of each day, I take a few minutes — five to ten is usually enough — to identify my top-priority tasks for the following day. My task manager includes a recurring weekday prompt: “What are the three most important tasks for tomorrow?” I ensure they are on my list so that I know my priorities for the day as soon as I begin work.
Summary
We can keep many balls in the air without dropping them if we consistently:
- Prioritize the important over the urgent
- Create a Strategic Priorities List
- Block our calendar for Strategic Priorities
- Do a weekly review
- Identify our top two to three priorities for each day, Carpe diem!