How Do I Get Time Back? A leader’s guide to regaining 502 hours a year

As a senior professional or business owner, your time is not just your own—it’s one of your company’s most valuable assets. But between managing your team, setting strategy, steering growth, and overseeing performance, it can feel like there’s barely time to think, let alone lead.

If your calendar is out of control, your inbox has a heartbeat, you feel like you’re constantly reacting rather than driving, and you lie awake in the middle of the night wondering what else has fallen through the cracks, you’re not alone. The pressure to do it all—and be across it all—is real.

How on earth do you get time back? Time to do what is most important?

The answer might be trite, but that’s because it’s true – driving success is not about working harder, it’s about working smarter: starting with how you spend your time.

How High-Performing Leaders Invest rather than Manage their Time 

Step 1: Switch your mindset 

Productivity is NOT about ‘time management’. Productivity is about ‘time investment’. Start thinking about your time the way you think about the company’s money – as an incredibly precious, limited resource that needs to be invested for the greatest possible return. You have a financial budget – so why not a time budget?

When you realise that your time is limited – that your annual ‘time budget’ is limited – you will stop cramming more into your calendar and start being very intentional about discreet investments of time that play to your strengths.

Bottom line: stop investing in tasks, people, habits and behaviours that waste your time.

Step 2: Audit Everything You Currently Do 

As a leader, you never make business decisions without getting the data first. Just like the company’s financial budget, you need to know exactly where your time is being spent.

Audit, or map your time across a number of days: list, real time, every single task you take on and the time you spend on it. Include every time you switch task and every time you are interrupted. No filters. List everything including meetings, problem-solving, content reviews, one-on-ones, email triage, phone calls home, interruptions from your kids, life admin… everything.

Bottom line: get the data.

Step 3: Identify you High-Value Tasks and your Low-Value Tasks 

Next, categorise each task into one of the following two lists:

High-Value Tasks: High Value Tasks are tasks which are at your skill level and which make or save the company money. These are the tasks that require your unique perspective, experience, or authority—and that directly impact growth, profitability, or risk mitigation. For a leader or business owner, High Value Tasks might include:

• Vision-setting and strategy
• Decision making
• Developing and nurturing key partnerships
• Leading investment strategy
• Representing the company to media, investors or boards
• Creating a cohesive senior team
• Product and service ideation

Low-Value Tasks: Low Value Tasks are tasks below your skill level and which generally cost the business money (because it will always be cheaper for someone else to do them). These are often tasks that need to be done, just not by you, and might include:

• First drafts of anything
• Rework of anything
• Micro-managing team decisions
• Sitting in on all meetings
• Calendar management
• Email management
• Interruptions

Bottom line: distinguish between tasks which make money and tasks which cost money.

Step 4: Prioritise Your High Value Tasks 

For every role in the organisation from the CEO down, we want to spend the majority of our time on our personal High Value Tasks.

Having identified your High Value Tasks – you want to manage your calendar (or more specifically have it managed for you – depending on your level, calendar management could well be a Low Value Task), so that you spend the majority of your time on the right tasks.

Your time should be leveraged for impact, not output. As a leader, your primary value is in vision, strategy, leadership, and enabling others.

Botton Line: spend most of your time on your High Value Tasks.

Step 5: Align your High Value Tasks to your Energy 

Structure your day around your energy.

Hear me out – this isn’t about beating drums and aligning your time with Saturn’s rotation around the Sun. This is about understanding when you are at your most effective and energised each day versus when you are most tired. If you don’t know when you have your most energy, then get the data by mapping your energy across a few days.

If your brain is sharpest and you are most energetic from say, 7:00am to 12pm, then you need to build a 6 foot high bullet proof fence around this time for deep strategic, visionary work.

Equally, knowing when you are at your lowest energy ebb each day means you can schedule to use this time for low-cognitive-load tasks.

Bottom Line: work to your energy.

Step 6: Delegate, Automate, or Reject 

As you review your High Value Tasks and Low Value Tasks, be ruthless and work out what you can get off your plate:

• What tasks can I delegate or outsource?
• What tasks can be automated or systemised?
• What behaviours (such as social media scrolling, multitasking, back to back meeting management) can be rejected?

Effective leaders are ruthless about getting tasks off their To Do List. They empower their teams with trust and clarity, define decision rights, and only escalate when absolutely necessary.

Bottom Line: focus your To Do List on tasks that only you can do.

Make Every Minute Count 

When you consistently focus on your High Value Tasks – or as one of my CEO coaching clients likes to call it – your ‘zone of genius’, you will firmly move yourself from a place of time ‘management’ to a place of time ‘investment’.

If you shift just 2 hours a day from the Low Value list to the High Value list, that’s 502 additional hours of strategic time reclaimed each year. Imagine what you could do with that time.

Bottom line: as a leader your job isn’t to do it all. Your job is to ensure that the right things are done—by the right people, at the right time—starting with you.

Written by Kate Christie.
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