Is Time Management Your Enemy? 4 Ways Coaching is Your Friend

I frequently hear from leaders like you that time management is one of their biggest challenges. On a normal day, you are in back-to-back meetings, dealing with fire drills, and responding to pings from Outlook, Teams, Slack, your phone, and more. You’re caught in a cycle that you feel you can’t disrupt. You also desperately need space to be forward-thinking about your business and its goals. In a schedule where all topics feel equally important, how can you make the changes you need to have a better handle on your time?

Coaching is ideal for busy executives because it is a dedicated space for you to be reflective, set clear priorities, and look forward.

Productivity blogs offer lots of helpful tips on how to better manage your time. However, leaders like you have a hard time putting those tips into action because you have not yet broken the mindsets and habits that keep you stuck in your busy cycle. This is where coaching can help. Here are four ways in which coaching can help you with time management:

Coaching helps you assess how you currently manage your time, and make changes.

Deepening an understanding of what’s driving your current state is critical. I’m not referring to the tasks you and your team need to perform to get to goal. That work is always there. I’m referring to the thoughts and emotions that keep you so busy. Thoughts like, “If I don’t do this, it won’t get done right” and “If I don’t do this, it will look like I’m too important to do the work. I’m not above the work.”

Through coaching, you can learn to balance your values with behavior changes that will propel you to direct your time to the responsibilities that are most critical for you to fulfill as a leader. Part of this will involve envisioning an ideal future state for your schedule and how you manage it. Creating a future state will help you have a forward-looking mindset: a mindset of stepping into a vision rather than one of correcting habits of the past.

Coaching allows you to pause and level-set, to improve your time management.

Not only can you literally catch a breath when you step into a coaching session, a coaching session is a chance for you to intercept the pace of a busy day — and reacquaint yourself with your spot in the driver’s seat. You get to decide what’s most important to you at that moment. You get to decide where you put your attention, why, and how. You could even shift the tone and course of the rest of the day for the better, by taking that coaching hour for yourself. Ultimately, time management is about knowing where to put your energy and why. Your sense of being overwhelmed and “I’m too busy” may just melt away with coaching.

The adrenaline rush you get when you’re busy makes it a great time for coaching. 

In this blog post about the coaching experience, I surfaced the concept that information lives in all parts of you. It lives in your mind, your physical body, your emotions, and your spirit. You might experience the day’s adrenaline boost in any or all of these forms – thoughts, physical sensations, feelings, and intuition. The high we’re on from adrenaline makes it easier for us to access the information that lives in you in those different forms. Focusing on how the adrenaline is showing up, and how it is impacting you, can guide us in what to do with it. It can help us decide how you want to approach your time, and how to put that insight into action.

Regular coaching helps you keep momentum in stepping into your ideal schedule. 

Maintaining a regular cadence with coaching is an effective way to build new skills and habits, including time management. Consistency builds momentum and muscle memory. Having dedicated coaching time will help you stop allowing the hectic vibe of the day to take control of you.

Also, when you use a session to live in the moment, and tackle a topic that feels present for you on that busy day, you start to deepen your self-consciousness. That self-consciousness will help you take pauses when you need them, and be more intentional.

Sometimes we speed by these moments as we may not realize there is something timely to process. What you learn about yourself in these heightened moments can support how you approach your goals and manage your time to reach them.

Giving yourself time for coaching in a busy schedule is a powerful way to center yourself, deepen self-awareness, and build productive habits. 

If you find yourself debating whether to sign up for coaching, or to keep a session you already have scheduled, get present. Ask yourself: What do I need most right now? How might coaching support me with that need? What is at stake if I don’t work with a coach? Putting a wrench in an endless cycle of being busy might be just what you need.