Effective Time Management for Leaders: Beyond ‘Keep It Brief’

Stop watching the clock and start reading the room. Here’s how successful managers balance depth with efficiency.

Managers often tell their teams to “keep it brief,” but complex issues need more than brevity. Here’s how to build a culture of meaningful, efficient conversations.

We hear a lot about “time management.” It’s the topic of countless training sessions, entire bookshelves, and more than a few apps. The advice is often the same: set strict boundaries, prioritize tasks, and stay within limits. For managers, that typically means allotting minutes to each item, limiting every conversation, and urging their teams to “keep it short.”

But there’s a different approach—one that can be more effective, especially in complex, human-centered work. Instead of setting limits, we can choose to give a matter “all the time it requires, and not a minute more.”

I don’t remember where I first heard this principle, but it’s the single most valuable time management idea I know. The phrase may seem simple, but it asks a lot of managers. It shifts responsibility onto us, rather than asking our teams to cut down, speed up, or simplify their thoughts. It’s a commitment to give each topic the consideration it deserves—and to move forward when that consideration is complete.

What This Principle Means in Practice

By promising to give a topic “all the time it requires,” we’re taking ownership of our engagement and focus. We’re saying to our teams, “This issue deserves to be explored in full—not squeezed into a 15-minute slot because that’s what my calendar says.” The “not a minute more” part brings essential discipline: we commit to moving forward when the matter is clear and complete.

This principle isn’t about abandoning structure. Rather, it’s about intentionality. It signals that we won’t cut things short that need depth, nor let discussions spin beyond their natural conclusion.

Why This Approach Works

This approach builds trust. When people know they’re not under a stopwatch, they engage more fully and honestly. They don’t have to compress nuanced issues into bullet points. They feel safe bringing the depth that matters require.

It also challenges us to be present rather than merely punctual. Our focus shifts from watching minutes tick by to ensuring each moment contributes to clarity and resolution.

Finally, it helps us avoid the “shortcuts” that often emerge from artificial time constraints. When we adopt this principle, we give ourselves permission to be thorough while maintaining momentum.

Real-World Application

In a project debrief, instead of saying, “We have half an hour to get through this,” try: “We’ll take the time needed to understand what worked, what didn’t, and what we can learn. Once we’re clear, we’ll move on.”

For 1:1 meetings, rather than saying, “Let’s cover everything in 15 minutes,” frame it as: “Let’s dive into what’s most pressing for you. We’ll take the time it needs and wrap up when we’re both clear.”

Recognizing When “Time Required” Has Been Met

One of the biggest challenges with this approach is knowing when you’ve reached that sweet spot – when a topic has received “all the time it requires” but hasn’t exceeded it. While this judgment will always involve some intuition, there are specific indicators that can help you and your team recognize when you’ve achieved sufficient depth. They are checkpoints rather than checkboxes – not every discussion will need to hit all of them, but they provide a practical framework for assessment:

Clear Decision Points

Have all key stakeholders voiced their thoughts?
Can participants clearly restate main points and decisions?
Are next steps and owners clearly defined?

Diminishing Returns Signals

Discussion is becoming circular
New points are variations of previous ones
Energy has noticeably dropped
Side conversations are emerging

Quality Indicators

Solutions address root causes, not just symptoms
Risks and implementation challenges are considered
The path forward feels robust, not rushed

Emotional Resolution

Tension has been addressed
People seem comfortable with the outcome
Team members appear ready to move forward

Communicating With Your Team

When introducing this approach, you might want to explain that you’re trying to create a culture where depth is valued and brevity is honored when clarity is reached. Make it clear that while you’ll give topics “all the time they require,” you’ll also rely on the team to bring focus and intention to discussions.

Final Thoughts

Time management isn’t about counting minutes—it’s about making moments count. Giving matters “all the time they require, and not a minute more” asks us to be discerning, and responsible for our focus. It respects complexity without letting it run wild, bringing clarity to conversations and depth to decisions.

Try it in your next meeting. And please take a moment to let me know how it goes —not a minute more.

Go HERE for more essays.

100 recommendations for making meetings more beautiful

Members of the House of Beautiful Business community shared ideas on how to improve meetings. Before you join your next meeting, have a read-through of what they came up with. See what the repetition is saying (or not saying).

Even better: before you schedule your next, ask yourself: does this really require a meeting?

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Highlighting content from my September 2021 newsletter.

The strength of weak ties

Perhaps you do this already with your team: you take the first few minutes of a meeting to check in, sometimes as a group and sometimes in random pairs or trios in breakout rooms. Just a few minutes to chitchat – about anything but work, like what would happen randomly at the office.

Well, Zapier, a company that helps its clients create automation workflows, is doing something similar but company-wide. They

try to make serendipitous, face-to-face interaction happen on a routine basis. We use a Slack app called Donut, which pairs everyone who signs up with a random coworker and helps schedule a video call. There are no rules to these conversations—people talk about where they live, their hobbies, or (if they want) work. These interactions don’t replace the serendipity of an office, but they can go a long way.

The topic of work is going to come up when you’re talking with random coworkers, because it’s the one thing you for sure have in common.

And there are benefits: these random conversations can lead to solutions, they connect people who might otherwise never talk, and it allows for what Mark Granovetter calls “the strength of weak ties”.

The content of this post was originally posted in the September 2020 issue of my newsletter. “On management and strategy” is a free, monthly newsletter in which I share my own writing as well as links to articles and research on management, leadership, and strategy. It’s easy to subscribe… and unsubscribe.

The medium is the massage: on doing the same expecting a different result

James Shelley on his blog:

Put a group of people in a room. Give them a whiteboard, pens, and markers. Ask them to develop an idea.

Put the same group of people in another room. Give them pipe cleaners, Play-Doh, a stage, a guitar, and LEGO. Ask them to develop an idea.

How different will the ideas be that emerge from the two different rooms?

In other words: How do the tools we use determine what we come up with?… or whether we engage at all.

It’s a question worth asking – in addition to location, time and venue.

Perhaps our people fail to come up with new solutions or ideas because we always ask them for those novel ideas in the same meeting, in the same place, in the same manner, and using the same tools.

More here.

p.s. The tile of the post is not a typo 🙂

Holding a meeting of people from different cultures

In one of the People and Business Management workshops that I facilitate we ask participants to outline how they would approach their first meeting as the manager of a multicultural team. I’m always pleasantly surprised by the imagination and inclusiveness of the responses.

This article in the Harvard Business Review provides useful guidance. Here’s an excerpt:

Do

Study up on the variations that exist among cultures and how those differences play out in the workplace

Create protocols and establish norms so that your colleagues understand how meetings will run

Incentivize colleagues to step outside their cultural comfort zones by institutionalizing rewards around what you’re trying to motivate people to do

Don’t

Be hung up on how people from certain cultures are supposed to act—remember, people are capable of adapting and adjusting their cultural default

Force a perfect dynamic in meetings—solicit colleagues’ opinions in other venues and encourage people to provide feedback in different ways

Overlook the importance of team bonding—encourage colleagues to get to know each other outside of meetings so that cultural differences won’t seem as glaring

There’s nothing more toxic to productivity than a meeting

Here’s [sic] a few reasons why:

They break your work day into small, incoherent pieces that disrupt your natural workflow

They’re usually about words and abstract concepts, not real things (like a piece of code or some interface design)

They usually convey an abysmally small amount of information per minute

They often contain at least one moron that inevitably gets his turn to waste everyone’s time with nonsense

They drift off-subject easier than a Chicago cab in heavy snow

They frequently have agendas so vague nobody is really sure what they are about

They require thorough preparation that people rarely do anyway – via Getting Real.

If you absolutely MUST have a meeting, follow these rules.