Blending Leadership: How I Do Things (Part 1)

One of the key takeaways from last week’s course is that in order introduce new leadership routines or practices, you first must “get your house in order,” specifically with how your day - and each hour within - is managed. There is no single correct procedure for this because people have different preferences, different contexts, and so on. Regardless of those differences, there is at least one thing  in common: it is better to be in control of your schedule as opposed to other people’s schedules controlling you. In a leadership position, there are always moments you have to react - or stop what you are doing - or get interrupted. I believe that effective leaders organize themselves so that their calendar - or their system - allows for such interruptions without derailing the entire flow. Here is a break down of my system.

Tools

First, here are the platforms and tools that are usually lead to something getting onto my schedule:

• Mail (MacOs) - Sending and receiving company email
• Gmail (Web Client) - All of my academic email addresses forward to my personal email account here
• Calendar (MacOS) - My company and personal calendar events
• Slack (MacOS) - My company communication 

In this first part, I’ll explain how I don’t let email mess up my routines, focusing especially on how I use MacOs Mail.

Mail (MacOS)

My company uses Google Apps, whose system of labels allows a message to be put into more than one category. This was not possible previously (at least to my knowledge) without making a duplicate so that you can put the same message in multiple folders. While Gmail’s web client honors the label view, MacOs Mail displays the labels as folders, and from this client you cannot add a message to multiple folders (at least I don’t know how). Anyways, I still like using this client because it is its own window, with its own badge notifications on my taskbar, and its own sound notification for new messages.

For any message that is in or comes into my Inbox, I have 4 possible moves after looking over it

1. Delete because I no longer need it and if I am wrong about that, I can easily track it down, or it is trash (if it is a mailing list that I didn’t want to be on I often unsubscribe right then before deleting it).
2. If no action is needed but I think I might need it in the future, I move it to a folder - I have folders for lots of different things - the list has grown over the years though I now only add about 1 or 2 folders per year.
3. If a reply or action is needed and it will only take me 1 minute to compose it /address it (like calling someone or walking over to them( OR it is truly time sensitive, I will address it right there and then move it to a folder
4. If a reply or action is needed but it is not urgent and will take some time or effort to address it correctly, I will block off 30 minutes in my calendar for it, estimating when that block of time will take place based on the context of the message thread.

This 30 minute thing is important . Basically - it might only take me 10 minutes to address it quickly - but I don’t want to take those 10 minutes right now (I’d rather go through and process whatever is left in my inbox). In that 30 minute block later today, or the next day, or next week - I’ll have created 20 minutes of unstructured time. I’ll get into how to use and combine unstructured time next week (or whenever I next write about this).