It’s an amazing feeling to get a promotion. You’ve been recognized for your results and ability to perform at a high level. You’re excited, and perhaps a little bit nervous, and want to prove yourself in your new role.
In this swirl of emotions, it’s tempting to double down on what you’ve already been doing that got you to this point. But as a time management coach, I’ve seen that using the same time management strategies in your new position as you’ve used in your previous one can actually sabotage your success.
Here are the four time management strategies to use when you get a promotion to help you succeed at this higher level.
Shift your priorities
When you receive a promotion, you typically take on a broader scope of responsibility. To do well in this larger role, you’ll likely need to spend less time on—or sometimes no time at all—on what you were doing in the past. Even though this makes sense intellectually, emotionally you can be tempted to revert back to doing the work you used to do or to constantly check in and “help” the people who are still doing those activities. The reason this happens is that you feel more comfortable in areas where you have years of experience. And your new role may include tasks you don’t feel as confident in—and some tasks where you may have no idea what you’re doing.
To fight this temptation, step back and think about what matters most in your current role. What are your annual goals? How will you be evaluated? What’s really your responsibility?
Then focus your attention on learning how to do this new work. If you’re doing your direct reports’ jobs, no one is doing yours.
Delegate more
When you’re a top performer, it’s easy to fall into the mindset that “I can do this better than anyone else so I should just do it myself.”
Although it may be true that you could complete a task at a higher level than others, that might not actually be in your best interest following a promotion. You can’t do what you did in the past to the same level of detail and handle more.
You not only need to be clear about your new priorities and resist the urge to do the job you used to do, but likely also you need to learn to delegate some responsibilities that are part of your new role.
For example, perhaps you’re promoted to a sales manager, and you’re now responsible for leading other salespeople in addition to personally working on a few large accounts. With this promotion, you may now have some administrative support as well as some junior salespeople under you. Because you’re taking on the new management responsibilities, you could release time by delegating items like:
- Background prep on prospects
- Coordinating meeting times
- Updating the CRM system after a meeting
- Filling out expense reports
These tasks likely still relate to the large accounts you’re managing, but aren’t items that need to be on your to-do list. By leveraging your team, you can focus your attention on the highest leverage activities that can lead to more sales.
Set more boundaries
Another counterintuitive shift that you need to make when you get promoted is to set more boundaries. It can be tempting to do the opposite and feel like you need to fling your door wide open to be available to staff. But if you’re in more meetings and have more responsibility, you actually have less flexibility for ad hoc chats.
At minimum, I recommend blocking some hours each week where you can do your own focused work. That might look like no meetings prior to 10 a.m. (unless it’s an emergency) or blocking out Tuesday and Thursday afternoons for two hours at a time to get your own work done.
If you protect time for yourself, you’ll actually be more present and helpful and available for your team. If you don’t give yourself any time to get your own work done, you can end up frustrated, resentful, and desperately trying to catch up on your own tasks after everyone else has logged off for the night.
Manage your inboxes
When you get more messages, you need to focus more on managing your inboxes instead of letting your inboxes manage you. That means that you’ll want to have a clear sense of your top priorities for the day and not allow yourself to get derailed by less important items that might pop into your inboxes.
If something comes in that’s not your top priority but will take a significant amount of time, you can either delegate it or reply back to the message letting the person know that you received their message and will get to the item soon.
Then you can plan in time to get the task done when it works for you. You can’t make everyone happy all at once so you need to reply to the most important messages and then triage the rest.
A promotion is an amazing opportunity to up-level your influence and skills. When you manage your time correctly, you can make sure that you continue to succeed and set yourself up for the next opportunity in the future.
