This article is part of a four-part series expanding on our flagship insight: "Thriving in 2025 – Improving Time and Priority Management."

In the initial piece, we explored how poor time and priority habits are more than just personal inefficiencies—they’re a major leadership bottleneck.

Over the coming weeks, we’re unpacking that in more detail, one layer at a time:

🔹 Week 1 – When Time Management Becomes a Leadership Bottleneck
🔹 Week 2 – The Science Behind Why Leaders Burn Out
🔹 Week 3 – 6 Time Strategies That Set High-Performing Leaders Apart
🔹 Week 4 – Time Mastery is the Foundation of Leadership Development

Poor Time Habits Aren’t Just Personal – They’re Organisational

Let’s be clear—when leaders struggle with time and priority management, it’s not a private issue. It’s a team issue. A business issue. A performance barrier.

We’ve seen it repeatedly: strategic leaders reduced to tactical responders. Smart people stuck in firefighting mode. High-value work pushed aside because the urgent always beats the important.

What starts as a scheduling problem quickly becomes a leadership bottleneck. Decision quality drops. Initiative dries up. Innovation slows to a crawl. And the team? They start mirroring that reactivity.

This isn’t about getting a better planner. It’s about rethinking how leadership energy is deployed—and protected.

Steven Covey's lessons from his time management matrix, which we have often seen misapplied, still hold true, The important and urgent dominate our time out of necessity, However the tendency to be deceived by "urgent" tasks that are not important and to "escape" to the "quadrant of waste" where the tasks are neither urgent nor important is still prevalant. The advice is simple:

1. Do a time/task audit and just get rid of the waste

2. Accept that you cant do the big important work in one sitting, use time blocking to work on "quadrant of quality" .... the important and not urgent....and then make progress with discipline. If this work become urgent - you simply won't cope.

Takeaway:

Leadership time is finite. If we don’t manage it strategically, we limit our ability to lead strategically.