As an aid to productivity, Franklin laid out a tight timetable for himself. Five o’clock was the hour to rise (after seven hours’ sleep), and noon to 2 was a break to “read or overlook my accounts, and dine.” Even Franklin, though, admitted that he could not always follow his own guidelines. “My scheme of order gave me the most trouble,” he wrote, because the outside world imposed demands of its own, making Franklin’s schedule “not possible to be exactly observed.”

Today, “time management” has grown into a multibillion-dollar industry, replete with books, blogs, gurus and electronic gizmos for tracking how you spend each and every hour of your day. But the fundamental challenge has always been the same: How do you focus intently and productively on what matters most, and leave aside the rest?

“Nothing else,” Drucker declared, “distinguishes effective executives as much as their tender loving care of time.”

What follows are the techniques employed by 10 effective executives to make the most of their time. We hope they’ll prove useful. After all, the best ideas aren’t just worth hearing; they’re worth stealing.

1

GEORGE RUPP:
CAP YOUR FACE TIME

Before he served as CEO of the International Rescue Committee from 2002 until last year, George Rupp was president of Columbia University. There is no escaping the heavy face-to-face requirements of such jobs—the speeches, the staff meetings and, above all, the relentless schmoozing with donors and prospective donors.

Without such interactions, Rupp would not have been able to double Columbia’s endowment (to about $4 billion) during his tenure there or to triple the budget of IRC (to more than $400 million). But with too many appointments, Rupp would have had no time for doing everything else a leader must do, including mapping out a vision, setting clear objectives and planning for the long term. As Drucker warned, “one cannot meet and work at the same time.”

That’s why Rupp resisted—and still resists—the pressure to allow face-to-face obligations to crowd out everything else. Specifically, he is rigorous about stuffing all of his meetings into one part of his daily calendar so as to reserve big blocks of time in the other part. “I have established a pattern that allows meetings and appointments to consume only a little more than half of each workday,” Rupp notes. “So I have almost half the day to complete the other tasks that I need to do.”

2

TONY HSIEH:
ANSWER YESTERDAY’S EMAILS TODAY

Zappos, the online retailer, prides itself on fast service. But its CEO, Tony Hsieh, is always a day behind on his emails.

That’s very much by design. Hsieh calls his system “Yesterbox,” and the idea is this: Rather than treat your emails like baseballs launched in a batting cage, taking a swing at each as it comes in, let them all settle and then review the pile the next day.

The advantage? “When you get up in the morning, you know exactly how many emails you have to get through, there’s a sense of progress as you process each email from yesterday and remove it from your inbox, and there’s actually a point when you have zero emails left to process from yesterday,” Hsieh observes. Now, instead of finding days broken up and time stolen, Hsieh is generally able to complete his email in a single three-hour stretch.

WATER 
COOLER 
CHATTER

Office workers are interrupted—by themselves or others—roughly every three minutes, on average.Tweet this

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The term “time management” started making appearances in the 1960s before taking off in the early ’70s, spurred in part by the publication of Alan Lakein’s How to Get Control of Your Time and Your Life. Tweet this

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A typical executive today can expect an average of 30,000 outside communications a year, up from 1,000 annually in the 1970s. Tweet this

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The average worker puts in only 1.5 hours of real work per day, with unproductive meetings filling much of the rest of the time. Tweet this

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A hat-tip to Gloria Mark of UC Irvine and Daniela Gudith and Ulrich Klocke of Germany’s Humboldt University; Google Ngram; Bain & Co.; and Microsoft, America Online and Salary.com, respectively.

Obviously, this system requires that you notify and gain acceptance from your co-workers, and exceptions must be made for emails that truly cannot wait. But the idea seems to have legs. When we contacted Hsieh to ask whether his method had any takers, he said that it did: “I’ve heard from several people who have tried it that it’s been life-changing for them.”

Perhaps, then, you’ll thank us for the tip. Tomorrow.

3

DEBRA SHRIVER:
DON’T WASTE WASTED TIME

When you start working for Debra Shriver, chief communications officer at Hearst Corp., you invariably get a brisk (some might say alarming) list of workplace rules to keep in mind. Among them: “If I have to remind you about a project, assume I think you are taking too long” and “If I have to remind or ask you a third time, assume I think you’ve dropped the ball.”

Shriver’s work is fast-paced, and she stays connected, answering correspondence promptly. (She’s no Tony Hsieh in this regard.) But she is careful with her time. In fact, consultant Julie Morgenstern has called Shriver “one of the greatest time managers that I know.”

One rule to which she adheres is “don’t follow brainwork with brainwork”—meaning that if you have to do some intense thinking, follow it by doing something light. But even more important to Shriver is the dictum, “Don’t waste wasted time.”

One spot where you’ll find an abundance of this is on airplanes, during which the only intrusion is the drink service. Since 2010, Shriver has published two books—Stealing Magnolias and In the Spirit of New Orleans—and she credits her output with making the absolute most of being sequestered on jetliners. “You can get a lot done in three hours of uninterrupted time,” she says.

4

SEAN JOYCE:
GET REAL WITH THE BOSS

It’s hard to manage a city of 240,000. It’s even harder when it’s a place that has, in the words of the Los Angeles Times, a “reputation for bitter and divisive politics.” And yet the metropolis with that reputation, Irvine, Calif., has also been ranked by the financial news and opinion website 24/7 Wall St. as the best-run large city in the United States.

Irvine’s manager since 2005 has been Sean Joyce, who, like all top administrators in cities with a council-manager form of government, not only oversees the administration of the city but also reports to the city council. It’s a tricky position. The time demands from below are extensive, but so are the time demands from above—and from multiple bosses, no less.

Joyce’s method of dealing with these challenges is, at heart, simple: He stays honest with himself about how much time he and the city workforce have to take on a particular task, and then makes clear to his bosses what trade-offs this entails. To ensure transparency, Joyce favors periodic off-sites with the city council in order to compare goals and set realistic priorities. “While I make a commitment that we will strive to do all that they wish to accomplish,” Joyce says, “I also help them understand our administrative capacity.”