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Getting pulled into the weeds at work is one of the most common frustrations I hear from leaders, and if you have ever looked back at your week wondering where all your time went, this episode is for you. The problem is not that you lack discipline or strong time management skills. The problem is structural.

Urgent work asks for your attention constantly. Someone needs a quick answer. Someone wants you to hop on a call. Someone needs your eyes on something right now. Strategic work never asks. Nobody sends you a Slack message saying your Q4 planning deserves your focus today. That asymmetry is the real issue, and fixing it requires a structural solution, not just a better intention.

In this episode, I break down what I call the supply and demand problem of leadership attention. I explain two distinct types of pull that keep leaders out of strategic work: internal pull (the dopamine hit of crossing things off a list) and external pull (organizational culture that rewards visible busyness and always saying yes). Understanding which one you are dealing with changes how you solve it.

I walk you through five concrete steps: naming the pull with a calendar audit, defining your strategic work in specific terms so it has a clear agenda, engineering the ask so strategy shows up and demands your time the way urgency does, identifying which type of pull you are fighting, and auditing the week honestly. These are not motivation tactics. They are structural interventions designed to make strategy compete on equal footing with everything else that wants your attention.

Listen and catch the full episode here or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can also watch it and replay it on my YouTube channel, JanelAndersonPhD.

When is the last time you blocked a couple of hours on your calendar just to think and actually kept that appointment with yourself. If you're struggling to answer that question, or if you feel that you get caught in the weeds way too often, this episode is for you, my friends, because the leaders that I work with aren't stuck in the weeds because they're undisciplined or because they're bad at their jobs. In fact, quite the opposite. But they're stuck in the weeds due to something that strategic work almost never does.

Strategic work never calls their name. The weeds they ask for your help. The weeds they're always looking for volunteers. By the time we're done with this episode today, you are going to see exactly why that keeps happening and what you can do about it, so that you spend less of your time down in the weeds and more of your time working on those strategic initiatives that you know are calling to you in a quiet voice that just never gets enough of you.

All right, so let's go behind the question for a bit and look at the context. So most people frame this as a time management problem, but I don't think it's a time management problem at all. You're great at managing your time. You know how to juggle various types of things across your calendar, many of you also have commitments that extend outside of the workday.

That you're somehow finagling time inside the workday to manage and make sure that those things get done. All of that caregiving and all of those other types of calls and appointments that you have to take. So it's not about time management. You know how to manage your time, and it's not that you don't have enough hours in the day.

We all have the same number of hours in the day, so that can't be it. And it's not just better systems; it's bigger than that, and it is deeper than that within each all within all of us. It's not that you just need to work less or delegate more. It's not that.

Again, it's something deeper, something more structural. This isn't a time problem; it's a supply and demand problem. So I want you to think about your average workday. How many times does someone pull you in for some little question?

Maybe it's urgent, or I think the more insidious ones are not the big urgent problems, but that hey, you got a minute? You got a. I need need a quick question answered. Can you take a quick look at this?

Do you have a minute? What could you? What would you do here in this case? Can you jump on a quick call with me on this?

Okay, it's those things that are eating away at your attention and pulling you down in the weeds. They're asking for volunteers. They're asking for just a little bit of help, but that little bit here and little bit there and a little bit here and a little bit there and a little bit, little bit, little bit all adds up and takes your attention off of the strategic priorities that, quite frankly, aren't going to get done because nobody's asking for them. Okay, now compare that.

You know, can you take a quick look at this? Can you hop on a call with me? Compare that to how many times your own strategic agenda reaches out and asks you for your attention. Zero.

Nobody interrupts you to say, "Hey, would you like to spend an hour thinking about next year's talent strategy? Probably not. Nobody's sending you a Slack message that says that your Q4 planning deserves some time today. Nope, nobody's doing that.

That's the real dynamic that's at work here. The weeds are always asking for volunteers. The weeds are always asking for your help, but strategic work that almost never does. Urgency recruits.

Strategy requires intention, and when you're in a leadership role, urgency has a whole team helping recruit on it. So when there is something urgent, you're going to learn about it. So don't worry about that. That's still going to pull you in sometimes.

Now, this used to happen to me all the time when I was in a corporate role leading a team, and we were working on global projects. And I would think to myself, "Oh, I've got this, you know, block of time that I really need to think about. And oftentimes it was our next quarter strategy because in the role that I was in, we were basically an internal consulting team, and I needed to find the projects that were going to keep my team busy for the upcoming quarter or you know full year, whatever. It was on my shoulders.

The projects didn't always just come finding us. I oftentimes had to go find them, and that's what kept our team viable because we were working on a chargeback economic model within the company. So I had to find the work in order for my team to get paid. Okay, not too different from my business now.

I have to find the work in order for me to get paid and for the team members who work for me to get paid. But back then, I would often think to myself, "Oh yeah, I've got this great opportunity. There's time on my calendar this week. There's unstructured time on my calendar.

I'm going to get all this planning done. I'm going to set up some of those strategic coffees with different business units to talk about what their product development schedule looks like for the upcoming year, so that I can figure out when we might be slated in to do a project for them, I would have these grand plans of how I was going to do some of that strategic thinking and planning for the upcoming quarter or the next half a year. And I'm sure you know what I'm going to say next. Come Friday afternoon, I would just look back at my calendar and say, "What happened?

I got none of that work done, but you know what? I got a lot of. I answered a lot of quick questions. I sat down with somebody to walk them through a piece of software that they were struggling with, and on and on and on.

So I answered all the quick questions, and they ate up all of the time that could have gone to my strategic thinking. And I'm sure you feel the same. You wouldn't be listening this far in the episode unless you felt that same. So again, this isn't a discipline problem.

It isn't a time management problem. It is a structural problem in how we think about our work, and the fix has to be structural too. Be more intentional simply isn't going to cut it as the answer here. Every leader who has ever wanted to be more strategic has told themselves to be more intentional.

It doesn't stick because the attention, the intention alone, cannot compete with a steady stream of actual incoming requests. I need your help with this. I need your help with that. Quick question here.

I need your eyes on this or your input there. Okay. The answer is, you have to make strategy ask. Okay, let me repeat that.

You need to have strategy ask for your time. You need to be the engineer who designs a system for your strategic work so that it functions in the same way urgent problems do. It shows up. It expects a response.

It doesn't get moved just because something else came up. Now, there are also two different kinds of pull happening here, and it really does help to know which one you're dealing with before you go ahead try and try to fix it from a structural standpoint. There's internal pull, and this is we are all I think subject to this busy work. Okay, busy work feels productive.

Tasks are concrete, completable, measurable. You can get your inbox down to whatever a tolerable level is for you. Maybe it's zero. That's so aspirational for me.

Maybe it's just a couple 100 off of the top. Whatever it is, those kinds of things feel productive, and it gives us a little hit of dopamine every time we cross an item off a list or take that inbox down to the tolerable level. Strategic thinking, on the other hand, is ambiguous. You can sit with a problem for more than an hour and still not be able to have a concrete solution to it.

You maybe can't even point to anything that you've actually finished, and so you're not getting that dopamine hit. Your brain defaults to the task. Your brain likes to default to tasks that have a clear finish line. Again, for those of you list makers out there, I'm sure you have added an item that you just completed to the list, only to check that off.

Okay, that's the dopamine hit I'm talking about, and those are the internal pulls that are pulling us to do these down in the weeds type activities. Now there is also an external pull, and this is where your organization may have some unspoken expectation that good leaders roll up their sleeves and get things done. Good leaders always say yes when people offer when people need help. If you were to say that's not the best use of my time right now, well, that might feel arrogant or get read that way by the rest of the folks in your organization.

Culture that you're in may reward that visible effort, that drop everything to help somebody mentality, and sometimes that pressure is very real. So, and I don't want to discount that, but if you are in that situation where you've got that external pull, we want to tread lightly on that because we don't want to ruin your professional reputation over this, but these two types of pull-an internal pull where you want to check items off of a list and get that dopamine hit, and the external pull where other people in the organization are asking for and expecting your help-well, these need different responses and different strategies. So the internal poll is about redesigning your environment, and the external poll is about managing perception and expectations, and sometimes having a direct conversation about it. But let's take them one at a time.

First, before you go about fixing it. I want you to name it. So before you change anything, spend some time noticing. And doing a good old-fashioned calendar audit is a great way to handle this.

And it might even be that a lot of those little things that pulled you down into the weeds never showed up in your calendar in the first place. So if doing a retrospective audit isn't going to work because those things didn't get recorded in your calendar. Then I want you to do the audit going into the coming week, or start right now with whatever day of the week you happen to be listening to to this episode. Start today, and just for one week's time, keep track of where your time goes, especially the time that is not already blocked on your calendar for other things, those being pulled into a quick, you know, a quick meeting, a quick question, hop on a call with me, those kinds of things that don't always show up on your calendar.

Okay, so we need to find out what the baseline is first, and we need to find out where you're being pulled because this way you'll be able to see if these are internal pulls where you spotted some time on your calendar and crank through some email, or got through some work that really wasn't urgent, and maybe nobody really cared about, but you just felt better because you could check it off of a list. Or if it is those external pulls that are pulling you away from the strategic work, pulling you away from the white space on your calendar that you would use to be generative and creative. Again, whether that's in a strategic like forecasting process and and planning for the future, or whether sometimes that strategy work is right now and you're going to use it to be creative and generative and make something right now. Okay, so every time you get pulled in, either by yourself or pulled into something by somebody else, I want you to log in.

You're logging this to look for patterns. So most leaders are going to discover that they're getting recruited in one or two or possibly three ways over and over again. And once you start to see the pattern, then you can start to design solutions for it. So if the pattern is yourself, and let's just say email, and you've probably heard me talk about this in the past.

If you're a longtime listener, but I've talked about managing your email so that it doesn't manage you. And if that is your issue, where you're got that internal pull of email or other, it could also be other work that isn't necessarily significant. Then what I would encourage you to do is shut that work down. So shut down, you know, whether it's Slack or Teams or your email, just shut that down while you're focusing on the other work.

If you are tempted to go look at that, now you may need to do some expectation management around that. If other people are expecting you to be answering their emails quickly, or to be constantly available on Teams or whatever. So, if you do need to talk it through with other folks, so that they know, hey, you know, between eight a.m. and 10 a.m. unless the sky is literally absolutely falling, I'm not available. Okay, but you have to do that work to identify where it is before you can start to design something that's going to manage it.

Okay. Second, define your strategic work in concrete terms. So, what does it actually mean to be strategic for you? Okay.

So, for me, strategy has to do with planning things like planning the next quarter's episodes of the Working Conversations podcast, for example, that would be something that I would spend strategic time doing. Another thing that I would spend strategic time doing is looking at my market and identifying new markets. So maybe there are. In fact, I was just on a walk the other day in a different part of town, and I saw like six different brand name companies that I recognize that I was like I did not realize these companies were less than a 30-minute drive from me.

So some strategic work for me would be reaching out to folks at those companies to see if they need help, either as you know from a keynote speaker standpoint, if they have a conference coming up, or if they have a training need that some of my training courses might satisfy. So for me, strategic work might mean again planning in the future for things like the podcast or doing business development because these are the kinds of things that keep my business alive. These are really important things to me. It doesn't.

It's it's not always that I can sit down and spend an hour doing those and feel like I can check a box. Sometimes I spend an hour doing those and I realize, oh my gosh, there's so much more work here than I realized. It's a bigger, you know, I've just opened this can of worms on myself. And but again, that that is then an important signal to me that I need to spend even more time and block even more time on my calendar for it.

Okay, but so what does strategic back to back to the question? What does strategic look work look like for you? Because if you haven't named it, and now you find a block of time on your calendar to quote unquote be strategic, you won't know what to do. So you need to make a list, and I am a firm believer in lists of this kind of thing.

What are the things that if you thought about it now, if you put several hours of planning into it, maybe not just today, but like this week, it will make a positive difference three months from now, six months from now. Whether that's in your bottom line, whether that's in your talent strategy, whether that's in your product development, whatever it is that you work on, what does it mean to be strategic, and what are the very specific tasks that go along with that? Okay, that was number two. Define strategic work in concrete terms.

Number three, engineer the ask. Okay, here's what I mean by that. Now I want you to create a standing demand for your strategic work. So this could be a calendar block that you treat like a meeting with your most important client.

And in fact, your meetings with yourself are you being attentive to your most important client. This is not just a flexible placeholder thing that you can move around and slide around when something else comes up. This is a weekly question that you're answering in writing. This is a weekly block of time that is on your calendar that you are beholden to, and set up all of the reminders for it.

So you're being reminded a day in advance. You're being reminded first thing in the morning that you've got this meeting coming up later. You're being reminded 30 minutes in advance, 10 minutes in advance, and so on, so that you treat it as if it were the most important thing on your calendar that day, because I can honestly tell you that it is. Now, if you want to get fancy with it, you can even do some other things with technology.

So, if you've got email, if if you're a whiz at email and you use Outlook or Gmail or really any any of the the email systems out there, you could send yourself an email. You could pre-schedule sending yourself reminders above and beyond what your meeting calendar invite is going to do for you. So you could send yourself an agenda. You could send yourself a reminder to think about the agenda in advance, so you could have some fun with technology.

Also, engineering the ask, so it's not just simply the placeholder in your calendar, but you're being prompted to think about it at different points in the week before it actually happens. All right, on to number four: know which kind of pull you're fighting, and I alluded to this already, but really, really specify: Is this an internal pull that is always drawing me away from the time that I should be spending to be more strategic, or is it me being pulled away by others? Because again, those two things you're going to treat those differently. If it's you, you're going to shut down all the systems that are tempting.

If it's others, then you need to engineer around that. Talk to those folks in advance. Let them know the times of the week that you're just simply not available because you're going to be working on your own strategy. Okay, and again, that may require some specific and explicit conversations with them, and it may require you to be unpopular because you might either not answer your Slack messages, not answer your Teams messages, not answer your phone, or whatever it is during that.

Let's say it's a two-hour block every Tuesday from eight to 10 a.m. and you might be unpopular for two hours. But guess what? Either their question is still going to be waiting for you at 10 a.m. or they will have found somebody in the meantime who can answer it for them. Either way, it's going to be fine.

Just so long as they know that you're not reachable and they know why you're not reachable. All right. Now comes the harder part. This is step number five: audit that week honestly.

So if you're doing the retrospective and looking back at the last week, be brutally honest with yourself. And again, I'm guessing that most of you who are getting that external pull-do you have a minute for this? You know, a quick question there, here, there, and everywhere, all of that. Your your calendar isn't going to give you the data that you need in order to do this audit.

You're going to need to start now and capture these things going forward, so that you can see where that where the poll is, if it's an internal pull or if it's an external pull, and again, if it's an external pull, there's a really good chance it's coming from just a handful of people. And sometimes all it takes is saying no to those folks or setting expectations with them that you're just not going to be reachable during just these two hours of the week. Man, two hours of the week can be a dramatic improvement on your ability to be strategic with yourself. All right, here is your call to action, my friends.

This is time to put it to work. So this week, I want you to start small. Put just one hour on your calendar as protected strategic thinking time. Just one hour.

If you need to, you could break that in half, and you can put 30 minutes at the beginning of the week and 30 minutes at the end of the week. That works too. If that's just what makes your calendar more manageable, label it with something very specific, not just thinking time. And as the time approaches, you should be collecting ideas that you're going to be thinking about during that time, so that you have a list of things that need to get done during that time because it's not just la la time.

It's not just your head in the clouds time. This is strategic time when you are planning something, when you are looking at ways to grow your revenue, when you are looking at ways to improve your product, your customer service, whatever it is that you do. You are looking to do more of it or do it better. That's what that time is for, or or plan for it in the future.

Okay, so again, you're going to give it an agenda. That agenda, those agenda items are going to pop up as the week goes on. Okay, and then here's the hardest part: keep it. Don't be tempted to move it to a different part of the week.

Don't let urgency claim that hour or those two half hours. So this first week, it's just one hour. Next week, you know what I want you to do? Up it to two hours, because and again, it could be one hour the first part of the week and one hour at the last part of the week.

Urgency is always going to be there asking for it. Urgency is always going to be there vying for your attention, volunteering you for things that you didn't even know you were being volunteered for, but you have to decide in advance that strategy is more important, and that your time belongs to strategy. This is what strategic leaders do, not because they have more time than everybody else, but because they stopped waiting for strategy to ask. Again, they stopped waiting for strategy to ask.

If this episode resonates with you, please share it with a friend. This is episode 281. You can find the show notes at Janel anderson.com forward slash 281 for episode 281, and you can also watch these episodes over on YouTube on my YouTube channel. We'll link those up in the show notes as well.

But I'm very findable over on YouTube, so please share the episode if you're listening on a traditional podcast player. Please rate the rate the show and give it some feedback. That helps other people find it, and in the end, that helps me tremendously. All right, my friends, go have a very strategic week.

Doing that audit, putting that extra time on your calendar for you to be strategic. And I will catch you right here next week for the next episode.

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