Episode 16 of Leading Matters features New York Times best selling author Kevin Kruse discussing his new book 15 Secrets Successful People Know about Time Management.  Kevin looks productivity and time management from the perspective of leadership and employee engagement, because leadership requires the time to actually lead.

Kevin Kruse’s new book, 15 Secrets Successful People Know About Time Management is out today, (it can be found on amazon, or you can download it for free at 15timesecrets.com). The book is a manual of how to’s that you can easily implement for yourself or your teams.  Having read plenty of books on habit and time management I can tell you that Kevin’s is one of the most practical and useful.

In our 30 minute interview Kevin explains how important the topic of time management and productivity is to the success of not only our careers and personal lives, but indeed to the success of our teams and companies. 

HIGHLIGHTS

Leaders Need to Free Up Time to Actually Lead

Kevin shares his insight on why productivity and time management are so important to leadership.  He share the reality that leading teams and people requires attention to more than just the daily to do list, and why we need to secure for ourselves the time to actively turn our attention to these matters.

Can’t Lead From Chaos

If our daily work lives are chaotic than our leadership efforts will be at best an afterthought, and at worst disruptive and destructive to the cohesiveness of our teams and our company culture.   

The Secrete is in the 1440

One of the common themes that Kevin discovered from his interview of some very successful people was that they all placed a very high value on their time.  There are, Kevin explains, 1440 minutes in a day, and once we’ve lived one minute we’ll never get it back.  To improve our productivity we must first improve the way we value our time. 

Battling our Future Selves

Procrastination is typified by avoiding that which we don’t necessarily like in favor of that which we would prefer.  Kevin offers that we all know what we should be doing, and the amount of time we should be doing it.  But our best intentions are defeated by a future version of ourselves that determine that our best laid plans can be altered in favor of some more immediate gratification.  Successful people know that their future selves are the enemy of productivity and they make plans to defeat this foe.

On Worklife Balance vs. Worklife Blend

Kevin suggests that there really is no such thing was work life balance, only work life blend.  We have to blend all of what we have going on in our lives in a manner that is most edifying to us, and those that matter to us.  Leaders and the very successful understand that they have to prioritize from this perspective and constantly evaluate those priorities.