Time Management

Select the right members and agenda items for your Leadership Team

Dirk VerburgLeave a comment

Most leaders leave the composition and agendas of their leadership teams to chance. This is a waste of time, energy, and focus.

Almost all senior leaders choose the members of their leadership teams almost by default: all their direct reports, as well as a selection of participants from staffing and back-office roles ‘in the matrix’ (Finance, HR, IT, Regulatory, Affairs, Communications, Quality Assurance, etc.).

The advantages of composing leadership teams in this way are that:

✅ Representatives of all functions are aware of every topic that is discussed (information and awareness)

✅ Participants from staffing and back-office functions feel they (and their functions) are taken seriously as true ‘business partners’

✅ The leader avoids difficult discussions about the composition of their leadership team

Although this sounds great, this typically results in:

❌ Large teams

❌ Long meetings

❌ Meeting agendas that lack a clear focus

Let me explain.

Continue reading →

Boost your personal productivity with these tips from five experts

Dirk VerburgLeave a comment

Steve Jobs said focusing “means saying no to the hundred other good ideas.”

Focusing is not something that comes naturally to me. Personally, I see opportunities everywhere around me, have a better eye for the upsides than for the downsides of these opportunities, and am blessed (cursed?) with a healthy degree of FOMO…

Therefore, I decided to make focusing my new-year resolution for 2023. 

For starters, I ordered five popular books of experts in the area of personal productivity in general, and more specifically on focusing.  

In this post, I will share my takeaways from their books. One word of warning: these are my personal takeaways – no mini-reviews! If you are looking for these, I highly recommend you to look them up on goodreads.com. 

Continue reading →

Starting your day with this simple habit will exponentially increase your personal effectiveness

Dirk VerburgLeave a comment

Make your responsibilities your priority

For many business leaders, their day in the office resembles drinking from a fire hose. Not only do they need to attend a large number of meetings (often back to back), they are also hit with a continuous stream of ad-hoc questions from their staff, peers, customers, and line managers which require their attention and action.

A couple of years ago I started to get really worried about my personal effectiveness. Despite the outrageous number of hours I spent at work, I found it increasingly difficult to complete my tasks and finish my projects.

In order to address this, I decided to analyze my workload to find out what I could do to change this.

Continue reading →

The Overloaded Organization: A 3-step Approach for Leaders to set Strategic Priorities and Manage Limited Resources (Focusing means saying no)

Dirk Verburg1 Comment

Illustration Artiicle Focus

Most executives I know are extremely busy. It seems they always have more things to do than they have actually time for. This is probably the reason why articles, books, websites and software packages claiming to offer personal productivity solutions are more popular than ever.

Time Management Tools have a limited effect…

No matter how different these solutions are, they all have one thing in common: they force choices. Whether it is the Eisenhower Matrix, Frank Covey’s Time Matrix or Dave Allen’s ‘Getting Things Done’ philosophy, they all force choices between things that need to be done and things that could be done.

Many people try to implement some or all of these tools and techniques in order to try to balance their time with the items on their to-do list. However, most of them remain structurally overloaded. They continue to have more ‘need to do’ actions on their to-do list than they have time for.

…because most often it is an organizational issue

Continue reading →