As you become more senior, responsibility at work (and in life) grows in every direction, and with that comes a big question. How to manage your time; and you need to manage you time because If you don’t manage your time, others will. Not intentionally or maliciously—it just happens through meetings, pings, email, and “quick questions” that fill every open slot.
Generally your time falls into three buckets:
- Reactive work: meetings, email, pings, escalations, alignment, reviews.
- Execution work: planned tasks that move projects forward—building, writing, shipping, closing loops.
- Compounding work: learning, creativity, networking, health, …. Easy to postpone but costly to ignore.
The trap is that reactive work is loud and urgent, while compounding work is flexible—so it gets pushed to “later.” And later often never comes.
That’s why it’s important to protect your time. Moreover, not every hour is equal. It is recommended to have a daily window of peak cognitive energy. I’m trying to build the habit of blocking that window on my calendar and treating it as non-negotiable. Otherwise, it gets consumed by reactive work—and you end up with a day full of activity, but little real progress.
A practical fix: block your peak hours for execution and compounding work. Even one protected block a day—one real “done”—can change how the day feels.