How to Manage Your Time When You're Also Managing a Team

You spend your morning in meetings. Your afternoon goes to answering questions, reviewing work, and helping people move projects forward. By the time things quiet down, you finally have a chance to open the report, the plan, or the project you intended to tackle that morning.

It's 4:30 p.m.

And your own work hasn't started.

If that sounds familiar, you're not alone and you're not bad at time management. Supporting your team is part of your job. The problem is that most schedules only account for one half of it: the meetings and deadlines everyone can see. The other half — your own deliverables, your thinking time, your preparation — gets whatever is left over. Which is usually nothing.

The goal isn't to squeeze more into your day. It's to stop letting your day get designed entirely by what comes at you.

Here's the system I use and teach, built on four steps: Capture, Prioritize, Layer, and Repeat.

Why traditional time management doesn't always work for managers

Most time-management advice assumes you control most of your schedule. Block your deep work. Batch your email. Protect your mornings.

But managers don't fully control their schedules. You're responsible for results and responsible for people. Meetings, decisions, coaching, approvals, and the unexpected needs of your team all compete with your individual work — and people don't arrive on a schedule.

Some of those demands are unavoidable. That's the job. But many of them can be improved through clearer expectations, better communication, shared decision-making, and intentional planning.

You can't organize your way out of an impossible workload. But you can create a system that makes your actual capacity visible and that visibility changes everything.

Step 1 — Capture the five things competing for your time

Before you can fix your schedule, you need to see it honestly. In my work with leaders, I use five categories that capture everything competing for a manager's week:

Category	What it includes
Meetings	One-on-ones, team meetings, cross-functional discussions, committees
Availability	Questions, approvals, decisions, coaching access, office hours
Events & projects	Deliverables, deadlines, campaigns, operational work
Professional development	Training, conferences, mentoring, skill development
Thinking, planning & strategy	Focused work, future planning, strategic decisions

Most managers account for meetings and deadlines. Far fewer intentionally reserve time for availability, planning, or their own development, so those things either don't happen, or they happen at 9 p.m.

Here's a practical exercise: estimate how many hours each category occupies in a typical week. Include the administrative work and the unexpected requests, not just what's on the calendar. You might discover that your week was already overcommitted before it even started. And if that's the case, no amount of time blocking was going to fix it.

That's not a failure. It's the first time you've seen your real capacity and you can't make good decisions about your time until you have.

Step 2 — Prioritize what actually needs your attention

Once everything is visible, run each commitment through three questions:

• Must I do it?
• Must it happen live?
• Must it happen this often?

A weekly status meeting might be useful, but maybe routine updates can happen asynchronously, while meeting time is reserved for decisions, roadblocks, and collaboration. Or maybe you're reviewing work that someone on your team could own, given clear expectations and real decision-making authority.

Before you decide where something belongs on your calendar, decide whether it belongs there at all.

What if there really aren't enough hours in the day?

It's worth saying plainly: not every overwhelmed manager has a personal organization problem. Sometimes the workload is genuinely unreasonable. Sometimes decision-making is unnecessarily centralized. Sometimes there are too many meetings, or responsibilities were never made clear.

A leadership schedule won't solve those issues by itself. But a clear picture of where your time goes gives you evidence — evidence you can use to make better decisions about delegation, expectations, priorities, and capacity, and to have honest conversations about what needs to change.

Step 3 — Layer your quarter, month, and week

This is where a schedule becomes a system. Instead of planning one week at a time, work in layers:

Quarter: What outcomes, deadlines, and major commitments are coming?

Month: What milestones, decisions, and preparation need to happen to meet those commitments?

Week: When will the actual work happen?

I've learned to put recurring commitments like year-end reviews, annual planning, and board reports on my radar months in advance. That doesn't mean things always go according to plan, but it does mean I'm not starting from scratch when the deadline gets close.

Your quarter determines your priorities. Your month turns those priorities into milestones. Your week makes room for the work that moves them forward.

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Ready to Get Your Week Back? Knowing what needs to change is one thing — making it happen is another. Join me for Get Your Week Back, a free, 45-minute, hands-on leadership workshop where we'll put this rhythm into practice. Explore the workshop and reserve your spot.

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Step 4 — Repeat the routines that make your schedule trustworthy

A beautifully designed calendar isn't enough. Priorities shift, people need you, and plans meet reality. What keeps the system working is a simple rhythm of planning and review:

Frequency	Suggested practice
Weekly	15–20 minutes to review commitments, priorities, and capacity
Monthly	30 minutes to anticipate milestones, deadlines, and team needs
Quarterly	60 minutes to review outcomes and establish priorities

These are starting points, not rigid requirements. The point is that you have a regular moment where you step back, look ahead, and adjust instead of reacting to whatever Monday morning brings.

A schedule isn't a system until you have a way to maintain it.

Example: A manager preparing for quarterly reviews

Imagine a manager who has quarterly employee reviews coming up.

Instead of waiting until review week and scrambling to prepare, they:

• Capture: Identify the reviews, preparation time, employee conversations, and follow-up tasks.
• Prioritize: Decide which preparation requires their direct involvement and which information employees can provide in advance.
• Layer: Put review deadlines on the quarterly calendar, schedule preparation milestones in the month, and reserve weekly time to gather feedback.
• Repeat: Use a running agenda or notes system to capture observations throughout the quarter.

The result isn't just a better-organized calendar.

It's less last-minute preparation, more thoughtful employee conversations, and fewer things to remember.

Your system should work the way you work

Here's something that surprises people: I still use a paper planner.

I love a good digital tool, and I've used plenty of them. But for my own planning, there's something about putting pen to paper that helps me see and retain the whole picture.

That doesn't mean my team needs to use my paper planner. We still need digital shared calendars, project management tools, and a reliable place to document decisions and conversations.

I don't think everyone needs the same system. I think everyone needs a system they trust.

For me, the distinction is pretty simple: my calendar tells me when something needs to happen, my project management system tells me what needs to get done, and my running agendas help me remember the context.

The tools matter a lot less than knowing where to find what you need.

I also pay attention to when I do my best work. I know which times of day are right for thinking, which are right for meetings, and which are better suited to execution and routine tasks. A realistic schedule accounts for your energy, not just your available hours.

Stop making your future self start from scratch

One of the most useful habits I've built is keeping running agendas for recurring meetings. Instead of trying to remember everything I need to discuss at next week's team meeting, I have a place to add notes and questions as they come up. When the meeting arrives, the agenda is already mostly written.

The same principle applies to bigger things. Instead of suddenly realizing year-end reviews are approaching, I've already accounted for the preparation and conversations they require because I planned them when I was thinking clearly, not when I was under pressure.

Leave breadcrumbs for your future self.

Every note you capture now is one less thing to remember, one less decision to make from scratch, one less evening spent reconstructing what you meant to do.

You don't need a perfect schedule. You need one you can trust.

Will unexpected things still happen? Of course. You're managing people. Things are going to come up.

But imagine starting Monday knowing what's ahead, what matters most, and where you've made room for your own work.

Imagine not spending Sunday evening mentally running through everything you might have forgotten.

That's what a good leadership rhythm can give you.

And it doesn't have to be perfect on the first try. Start with one week. See what works. Adjust what doesn't.

That's how you find your cadence.

If you'd like a guide through it the first time: join me for Get Your Week Back, a free, 45-minute, hands-on workshop. You'll walk through your current responsibilities, identify where your time is going, and leave with a first-draft weekly schedule, a monthly planning rhythm, and a quarterly roadmap. No perfect calendars required — just a willingness to try a better way of working.

Explore upcoming sessions and reserve your spot

Frequently asked questions

How do managers balance their own work with managing employees?

Managers can balance both responsibilities by identifying recurring leadership commitments, clarifying what requires their direct involvement, and scheduling time for focused work, team support, and unexpected needs. A repeatable weekly planning routine helps keep those responsibilities visible.

How should a manager structure their week?

A manager's weekly schedule should account for meetings, availability for questions and approvals, projects and deliverables, professional development, and strategic thinking. The exact allocation depends on their responsibilities, team needs, and capacity.

Start by putting your nonnegotiable commitments on the calendar, then reserve time for focused work and predictable team availability. Leave some capacity unassigned, because something unexpected will almost certainly come up.

How can managers reduce interruptions without being unavailable?

Managers can create predictable availability windows, establish clear expectations for urgent requests, and give employees more ownership over decisions they are equipped to make.

How do directors find time for strategic planning?

Directors can work backward from quarterly priorities to monthly milestones and reserve recurring weekly time for planning and strategic work. They should also review which meetings and approvals genuinely require their involvement.