Time Management Training: Why Most Leaders Are Getting It Dead Wrong

My coffee went cold whilst I watched a department manager spend forty-seven minutes trying to schedule a fifteen-minute meeting yesterday.

Honestly, the irony was so thick you could've spread it on toast. Here's someone who desperately needs time management training, wasting everyone's time because they've never been taught the basics. It's like watching someone try to build a house without knowing which end of a hammer to hold.

After fifteen years consulting with Australian businesses—from mining companies in Perth to tech startups in Melbourne—I've seen this same scenario play out hundreds of times. Leaders promoted for their technical skills, then left to drown in meetings, emails, and the endless administrative quicksand that comes with management roles.

But here's where most organisations get it spectacularly wrong.

They think time management is about apps, productivity hacks, and colour-coded calendars. Wrong. Dead wrong. Time management for leaders isn't about managing time at all—it's about managing energy, attention, and other people's expectations. The calendar stuff? That's kindergarten-level thinking.

Let me share something controversial: 73% of the time management training I've witnessed in corporate Australia is complete rubbish. It focuses on the wrong things entirely. Organisations spend thousands sending their people to learn about prioritisation matrices and task batching, when what they really need is boundary-setting and the courage to say no.

Real time management training starts with understanding that your calendar reflects your values, not the other way around. If you're constantly firefighting, constantly reactive, constantly behind—that's not a time problem. That's a leadership problem.

I remember working with a regional manager at a major retailer (I won't name them, but let's just say they're everywhere in suburban shopping centres). This bloke was working 70-hour weeks, pride written all over his face like a badge of honour. "I'm indispensable," he told me. "The place would fall apart without me."

Biggest lie he ever told himself.

What he'd actually created was a system where he was the bottleneck for every decision. Staff couldn't move without his approval. Simple problems escalated to crisis level because he hadn't trained anyone else to handle them. He wasn't indispensable—he was incompetent at delegation.

That's the first controversial opinion: If you're working more than 50 hours a week as a manager, you're probably doing your job wrong. Yes, I said it. Industries like hospitality and retail have normalised this madness, but exceptional leaders create systems that work without them constantly pulling levers.

Woolworths understands this beautifully. Their store managers aren't heroic figures working themselves to death—they're systems thinkers who've trained their teams to handle 80% of daily operations without intervention. Smart companies invest in proper management training that includes delegation, not just time-blocking techniques.

Here's the second controversial bit: Most urgent tasks aren't actually urgent. They're just loud. The person walking into your office saying "I need this immediately" usually means "I failed to plan ahead and now I want to make my problem your emergency."

Effective leadership training teaches you to distinguish between genuine urgency and manufactured panic. Real emergencies are rare. Everything else is poor planning disguised as crisis management.

But Australian workplace culture makes this particularly challenging. We've got this twisted relationship with being busy. We wear exhaustion like a medal and confuse activity with achievement. LinkedIn is full of people bragging about their 5 AM starts and midnight finishes, as if sleeping less somehow makes you more dedicated.

Absolute nonsense.

The best leaders I know—and I'm talking about people running multi-million-dollar operations—are off the tools by 6 PM most nights. They've learned what every tradesman knows instinctively: you can't maintain quality work when you're knackered.

Speaking of tradesmen, they actually understand time management better than most office workers. A carpenter doesn't try to do electrical work, a plumber doesn't attempt tiling, and a painter doesn't suddenly decide to do the plumbing. They stick to their expertise and collaborate with specialists for everything else.

Yet in offices, we expect managers to be experts at everything: people management, financial planning, strategic thinking, conflict resolution, project management, and whatever else gets thrown at them. Then we wonder why they're overwhelmed.

Proper time management training should include a heavy dose of "not my job" training. Teaching leaders when and how to refer issues to specialists, when to escalate versus when to delegate, and crucially—when to simply say no.

I learned this the hard way about eight years ago when I tried to be everything to everyone. Client calls at 9 PM, weekend "emergencies," and the classic "quick question" that turned into hour-long consultations. I thought I was being responsive and professional.

What I was actually doing was training people to disrespect my time. Once I started setting proper boundaries—specific office hours, defined response times, clear escalation protocols—my effectiveness tripled and my stress levels plummeted.

The most effective time management technique I teach leaders? The art of productive procrastination. Not all procrastination is bad. Sometimes delaying a response or decision gives you crucial information you wouldn't have had otherwise. Sometimes the problem solves itself. Sometimes the person asking finds their own solution when you're not immediately available to fix it for them.

This drives type-A personalities absolutely mental, but it works.

Technology should be your ally in this, not your master. I'm constantly amazed by managers who check emails every few minutes, respond to every notification immediately, and then wonder why they can't focus on important work. Your phone has a "do not disturb" function. Use it.

But here's what really gets my goat: organisations that provide time management training without addressing their own broken systems. You can't teach someone to manage their time effectively in an environment that rewards firefighting over prevention, reactivity over planning.

If your workplace culture celebrates the hero manager who saves the day through heroic overtime efforts, you're incentivising exactly the wrong behaviours. Those heroes are usually the ones who failed to prevent the crisis in the first place.

Real leadership development addresses this system-level dysfunction. It teaches managers to identify recurring problems and build processes to prevent them, rather than just getting better at fighting fires.

The companies getting this right are investing in comprehensive management development, not just time management workshops. They're teaching strategic thinking, systems design, and team development alongside calendar management.

And they're seeing the results. Lower turnover, higher productivity, and managers who actually go home at reasonable hours because they've built teams and systems that function without constant oversight.

But most organisations are still stuck in the industrial age, treating managers like glorified supervisors rather than system architects. They promote their best individual contributors and then provide minimal training on how to be effective leaders.

It's like promoting your best footballer to coach and then only teaching them how to blow the whistle louder.

If you're a leader struggling with time management, start here: audit where your time actually goes for one week. Not where you think it goes—where it actually goes. Track everything in fifteen-minute blocks.

You'll probably discover that interruptions and unplanned work are consuming 60-70% of your day. That's not a time management problem—that's a systems and boundaries problem.

Then ask yourself: what would happen if I wasn't available for half of these interruptions? Really think about it. Would the business collapse? Would customers flee? Would projects fail?

Probably not.

What would probably happen is that your team would step up, develop problem-solving skills, and become more autonomous. You know, like proper teams are supposed to function.

The goal isn't to become unavailable or unapproachable. The goal is to become strategically available for the things that actually need your expertise and experience, rather than being tactically available for everything that walks through your door.

That's what effective time management training should teach leaders. Not how to cram more tasks into an already overpacked day, but how to design their role so the right work gets the right attention from the right people.

Everything else is just rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic.