Make the Damn Time
Early on I thought strategy was something that would happen once things calmed down. Things never calm down.
For something that is so clearly important to the role of leadership, it’s kind of amazing how little time a lot of managers dedicate to it in our day to day work.
I made some pretty classic mistakes when considering strategy. At first I thought it was just something that happened around the other work as a sort of natural side effect of everything else I was doing. That couldn’t have been further from the truth. My early management was defined by reactive, day to day problem solving. It was super grounded in tactical thinking. I figured that because I was being intentional and thoughtful I was operating at a higher level. I would’ve said I was being strategic or thinking strategically and I’d have been wrong.
Management is a much lower stakes game of Emergency Room where new problems are constantly rolling through the double doors and it’s your responsibility to triage those issues. Not solve every single one at the same time, but prioritize and mitigate fallout.
If I wasn’t actively making time for strategic thinking, there was always other work that would take its place.
If I was not prioritizing strategic work I will never “just have the time.”
I began to think of strategic thinking as a defended resource. Not something that happens when the calendar clears, but something that only exists if you protect space for it.
Strategic work is what gets you out of firefighting mode and back to shaping how your team actually operates inside the organization. Because I don’t think anyone really dreams of becoming a manager to fix a team’s broken ticket refinement ceremony for the fifth time in your career. You become a manager to impact a piece of an organization. And that requires strategy.
So make the damn time!
The question isn’t whether strategy matters. It’s how you make time for it when your calendar already feels full. How do managers actually create space to lead instead of react?
It’s a loop that reinforces itself. You can’t think strategically because you don’t have time, and you don’t have time because you’re not thinking strategically. At some point something has to give so you can put time on the calendar. Actually blocking it off.
I started small in my quest to make time for strategy. I found already open blocks on my calendar and reserved them for myself. It wasn’t long before I needed more. I was hooked. It was time to seriously reassess what I had committed to in terms of my time. Were my one on one meetings too frequent? Was I attending recurring meetings that had outgrown their value? I adjusted as needed. Then ruthlessly blocked my time.
As of this post I have three main blocks on my own calendar that I defend ruthlessly. I have an operational alignment block where I make sure my week is set up to achieve my highest priority goals. I have a deep work block for the to do items that need more than ten minutes between meetings to accomplish. And I have a strategic block. Maybe for others this is a walk outside or a block of time with just your thoughts and a notepad. Because I don’t do well with wide open blocks of time and no clear call to action I have a strategic thinking template I use. It’s a great launching off point each week to get me focused on what’s potentially working or not working about how my teams operate or what the org is prioritizing. From there I can choose my own adventure about which problems to solve but that initial template is what I need to get in the zone.
Strategic thinking isn’t something managers earn time for later. It’s something to defend now so later gets easier. Strategy didn’t start happening when I became a more senior manager.
It started happening when I started protecting time for it like it was part of the job because it is.
