Make before you manage: How leaders protect their best thinking time
Having just arrived back from a long weekend away, the GM sitting in front of me grinned as he told me:
“I’ve got 102 unread emails that have been sitting here since Thursday.”
Like this senior leader, and probably like many of you, I regularly arrive at work to an inbox stuffed with new and unread emails requiring attention.
What I loved most about this GM was that he’d prioritised our conversation about his leadership team development and strategy over the busy-work of replying to the raft of messages waiting for him.
That sounds obvious.
But it isn’t always how we work.
For many leaders, one of the first things they do each morning is open their inbox.
I actively made the choice years ago to keep writing and responding to emails as one of my lowest-priority activities. Communication obviously matters to me, but I quickly found that if I tackled my emails first thing, my inbox would start filling back up with replies to my replies before I’d even finished.
It never ended.
Whole chunks of the day could disappear between meetings, responding to messages and chasing the elusive goal of “inbox zero”.
Meanwhile, some of the work that mattered most was getting whatever time and energy I had left.
Make before you manage
My decision to work differently was shaped in large part by one simple mantra:
“Make before you manage.”
Make before you manage means protecting your best thinking time for important work before email, admin and other people’s priorities take over.
The phrase comes from Tim Ferriss, whose thinking was influenced by Paul Graham’s excellent essay, Maker’s Schedule, Manager’s Schedule.
The idea is to protect time for creating, thinking and making progress on important work before turning your attention to the management of everything around it.
For me, that means that on an ideal day, I won’t know what is sitting in my inbox until midday at the earliest. Often, it’s much later.
Instead, I try to use my best thinking time for things like writing, developing ideas, working on the business, solving difficult problems, shaping strategy or moving an important project forward.
Then I manage.
Email. Admin. Messages. Approvals. Scheduling. The endless collection of small tasks that come with running a business.
None of those things are unimportant.
The problem is that they are extremely good at pretending to be the most important thing in the room.
Management work expands
There is something particularly dangerous about email and other management tasks.
They are almost infinitely expandable.
You can always answer another email. Check another notification. Make another small decision. Clear another task.
And because each one gives us the reassuring feeling that we are being productive, an entire day can disappear without us making meaningful progress on anything important.
That is why “make before you manage” works so well for me.
It changes the default.
Rather than asking whether there is enough time left for focused work once everything else has been dealt with, it gives focused work first claim on my time and energy.
The management work has to fit around it.
Why this matters for leaders
I’m amazed at how many senior leaders and middle managers start their day by opening email, Teams, Slack and a collection of other management-task tabs, both on their screen and in their mind.
Before long, their agenda for the day has effectively been set by everybody else.
For leaders especially, that matters.
Some of your highest-value work will rarely arrive marked urgent.
Thinking.
Planning.
Making difficult decisions.
Developing people.
Working through a strategic problem.
Creating something new.
These things are incredibly easy to postpone because nothing immediately breaks when you don’t do them.
But over weeks and months, the cost becomes significant.
So perhaps the challenge isn’t to become better at getting through everything.
It is to make sure the most important things get your best attention before everything else starts competing for it.
Make before you manage.
If you protected just the first hour of each day next week from email, messages and distractions, what would you use that time to make progress on?
