Why Great Leaders Stop Trying To Be Busy

22:22Matt Brittin:And so for me, I can I can be comfortable with saying I don't know. For me, it's a way of building trust and learning. And I think, you know, I've said a couple of times already, my number one rule of leadership is listen. So like I'm all about asking the questions and quite often they might be dumb questions and being confident enough to sort of ask those questions and build trust by sort of learning together. So I hope that's been part of what I've tried to bring to leadership, because pretending that I know all the answers, people are going to see through me pretty quickly. so in terms of time again um one of the things that i always felt was useful to get that sort of balance between being sufficiently across things without feeling you need to be over prepared in an unrealistic way was just having kind of safety valves built into my working week so you know for me long before it became a thing i would have a work from home friday so i'd do a shorter day mostly because i had kids and i just wanted to be able to have a clear demarcation between the time I spent with them and the time I was at work but I also just really valued that low meeting density day to have the space to do other stuff what about you how did you go about well there's two things there that I think are interesting one is the sort of transition time and then the other is kind of sort of how you manage time and energy I think the transition time one is something we don't often talk about actually which is you know is really you do need a decompression time sometimes out of a working day to show up well in your social circle or with your family.

23:54Matt Brittin:I found that when I first started working in technology, actually when I first started working in newspapers, I started cycling to work when I had really young kids. And it meant that the moment I left the office, I was focused on staying alive and getting home. And by the time I got home, I'd forgotten the working day. And that really helped me to be present with a young family that's so interesting i i would say the pandemic made me learn to love my commute which i never thought was possible as i travel on the london underground and on the buses and it's not the easiest commute um and i the reason i i learned to love it during the pandemic is i realized traveling time is processing time and um if you try and cut out all those little bits of buffer in your day, you just become less efficient.

24:43You don't become more efficient.

24:45Matt Brittin:Completely. We can talk a lot more about this subject. I think the other thing that I find personally, and if I encounter somebody who's really swamped, the first thing I'll ask to do is look at their calendar. And because the calendar is the manifestation of the choices you make about time. Yeah, so true. And so if you look at my calendar, now you can have a go at me. it's multi-coloured because I put different colours in for different things internal meetings external meetings travel time exercise and so that actually helps me to get a sense of without even reading anything I'm a visual person too what does a week look like I remember when I had very young kids I decided what I really wanted to try to do is ensure I could take them to school at least twice a week my wife was working as well and so we're kind of dividing and conquering had a bit of help at home but not much and um the way I made that happen was to put it in the calendar and say it is a as important as my most important meeting of the week it could move day but it couldn't drop out of the week and that really helped me to kind of keep some sort of sense of balance at a time when I was really ramping up and there was a hell of a lot to do as the kids got to the point where they didn't care about me being around anymore and a bit older I started to do the same with exercise.

26:03Matt Brittin:I was working very late nights, sometimes talking to people all around the world. And I put exercise in my calendar several times a week and try to make sure that that also happened. So I think keeping an eye on calendar health. Was that visible to the rest of the organization or was your calendar completely private and people wouldn't have known you were doing that? At some point the calendar became private, otherwise people would just write their own meetings in. So taking control of your calendar was important. But I would talk about it. I used to stand up and talk in front of the team every week about like how I'd spent my time and I would always talk about some personal uh stuff people would see me they've got when I left I had a whole bunch of people writing and saying I used to enjoy seeing you in the gym at three o 'clock in the afternoon made it okay for me to go at three o 'clock in the afternoon but that's an interesting yeah kind of point as well which I don't care what time you're working if you get your work done to the right quality and you're learning and growing and having an impact you know what do I care um how you're uh doing in terms of clock watching Yeah, we've come a long way, haven't we, in terms of that kind of permission to be more flexible, how you stretch your day.

27:02Although your memory, your reference to gym in the afternoon did just remind me of a brief period when I was working at the House of Commons when I did actually go to the gym. I have to confess, I didn't go to the gym for very long because I found it just too disconcerting to suddenly find myself, you know, in the sauna with some politician that I knew off the TV.

27:27Matt Brittin:That's a whole other podcast, I think. Let's save that. So I'd like to say that, you know, that's the reason I then just gave up exercise, Matt, but that would be a total lie. So anyway, but it was definitely one of the most surreal moments that the House of Commons. Right. Let's let's segue. Let's swerve. I think we need to get out of that. We'll come back to that. If there's enough votes, we'll come back to that story. Enough is enough. Right. I'm going to take you to my PhD when I learned something else that was very useful, served me well in terms of how I've tackled time. For people who don't know you, just tell us a bit about what were you, what was your PhD in?

27:59Matt Brittin:What was your field of research? You don't really want to know this, Matt. I think we do. Oh, God. OK, so my PhD was in how bodies respond when it detects a virus. And it's quite funny because now this is something that sounds quite relevant to everybody because we've all lived through a pandemic associated with a virus. Now, when I was doing my PhD, eyes would glaze over when I even got to the first word of that sentence. But essentially looking at how your body responds, how it executes the response at the cellular level when it gets a message that there is a viral infection. So doing a PhD is a very particular sort of experience.

28:40you have to be incredibly self-sufficient and um it's so different from what you do before so particularly when it's um experimental um you have to go and stand in labs with all this equipment that you've never used before uh it's you know a kind of big intellectual journey but also it's like your first experience of the world of work well I mean I've done jobs before but not full time every day for four years. And so I had this sort of sense of overwhelm again, you know, it's very intimidating intellectually. And there's also, you know, quite a lot of health and safety involved. And so I realised that it was, it was a kind of a problem that I would start each week thinking, oh, so many different things that are making me feel intimidated and overwhelmed.

29:29And so what I figured out is, generally speaking, it's not the volume of stuff that's making you feel overwhelmed. In my case, I had four years.

29:38Matt Brittin:Right, yeah. What's the time pressure? What it really is, is that there's something on your to-do list that is scaring you disproportionately. And so I learned, I taught myself a rule, do the thing that scares you most first. You must have had some tough Mondays then. Well, this sounds like it's hardcore. You're being tough on yourself. But actually what you're doing is alleviating the stress quantum, right? You're reducing the total amount of stress you're going to experience. Because by tackling the thing that is causing you the most fear, the rest of your day or your week is going to be a lot better.

30:18so it was a strange insight i didn't know this term at the time uh strange insight into how cognitive load affects your experience of stress and of time and by reminding myself whenever i feel that you know blood pressure rising the walls are closing in that sense of oh god i haven't got a grip on this reminding myself that there's probably just one or two things that if they were under control I'd feel 10 times better has helped me time and time again that feels genius

30:49Matt Brittin:so can you give us even more insight into this so you're on a Sunday evening thinking about what have I got to do in the lab this week or whatever um what kinds of things might be the sorts of things that were giving you that that um feeling I mean you know I I think I found lots of things anxiety generating it might be I had to stand up and present my results in the lab meeting or it might be that um i had to try a technique i'd never tried before uh i had to ask someone a favor and i was scared of them i mean you know this is real life yeah so it could be very human things not like i've done an experiment that could blow up it was much more practical than that no and and you know i mean doing a patient is quite an intense experience i literally used to dream my experiments ahead of the day when i had a big day on i would wake up having done pre-planning in my sleep i kid you not that's how immersed i was in it but mostly the things that stress you out are the human things yeah of course it's very rarely something that's just oh i've got to read a hard paper um those things you have control over well welcome to another episode of inside the mind of a scientist that's amazing i feel like i may have overshared matt tell us some stories about how you learned to manage time better i'm loving this sort of going back and thinking about these stories because when when you tell me tell one it makes me think of something somewhat relevant or similar and I think you talked about how thinking ahead about what was coming gave you a sense of anxiety generalised which you then had to kind of focus on well what was the real thing.

32:20Matt Brittin:I think in the micro moment there's also the same kind of thing that I've tried to learn to recognise in myself which is when an emotion kind of comes up in a working environment that that is somebody told me this because I remember I worked a lot with engineers as well. They said, emotions are data. That is your body telling you a new piece of data. And the data, you know, for example, I'm feeling anxious. Where's that coming from? So I learned to go, oh, I'm feeling anxious. Where's that coming from? Is that coming from me? Or is it coming from somewhere else? And actually, quite often, you pick up an emotion from somebody else.

32:58Matt Brittin:An interaction you've had, somebody themselves is anxious, or they're a bit frustrated, or there's a bit of anger or a bit of passive aggression and I'd feel that and I think you know I'm on one level quite empathetic because I pick these emotions up and another I'm a bit stupid because it would take me a while to go hang on that's not coming from me where's that come from what's that doing the other thing was for self-regulation so I'd notice quite often on the late night call I'd be looking down a camera to talk to my friends in California it's like 11 30 at night I've got to get up at five to go on a flight and I'm getting quite grumpy and I learned to recognize that and go okay grumpy Matt is not the best Matt so let's just recognize that and politely potentially say hey I'm really sorry I do need to kind of get to this point because I'm you know I'm getting quite tired people completely understood that but what people didn't understand is Matt kind of being grumpy and interjecting in a brusque way in a meeting what the hell's wrong with him having forgotten that it was that kind of time of day so I think those those points that come out there around in the moment recognizing what's going on really helped me and did you kind of continue that theme did you find ways to help um you know use scheduling you use time management to get the best out of you know when you are at your best yes uh we talked a bit about the week and you know putting priorities in uh one of the things we have to do is is learn who we are and when we're at our best i'm a mornings person you know i used to get up early and go rowing in the mornings and um i would find that i was cognitively at my best in the mornings and i think in the population that's a slight majority from scientific studies and maybe it's but but you know um people work in different ways at different times so what i started to try to do is put sort of thinking work early in the day and another sort of tip going back to your beautiful colored pens way of sort of prioritizing things i would try to make sure that i would have the occasional bit of what i would call block time in morning so i might put an hour to an hour and a half of block time in and i wasn't necessarily sure what i was going to use it for and as i approached it i might put into that block you know draft outline speech for this review presentation for that call these three people so i could use it in a way that was productive but it was scheduled at a time of day where i felt like i was at my best unfortunately there were meetings that were scheduled for times when i was at my worst and that's what I've tried to cope with over the years.

35:23And what about for traveling because you know it's it's all very well to have your nice structured life when you're in control of the hours but traveling throws everything up in the air and I guess you had to do quite a lot of traveling in your job.

35:35Matt Brittin:Yeah I was lucky most of my traveling was sort of vertical in other words so you know that I was responsible for Europe the Middle East and Africa for sort of 10 years and most of my time was in Europe so it was sort of tolerable. Time difference is manageable. The things I found difficult were late night call followed by early flights and going back to you know lesson learned from from an early boss when you go to a country I had like people on the ground in something like 40 countries some of those countries you're only going to go to maybe once a year so if they see you at a time when you're tired frustrated ill-prepared yeah then that's a disaster for culture because you know they read the boss's tone they want to be confident clear what they're up to, you know, inspired, felt listened to, all of that sort of stuff.

36:20Matt Brittin:And I need to kind of make sure I use the trip to get sort of intel on what's going on and how I can support the team. So I feel like that's part of the application of that lesson about really being prepared. I would make sure that, you know, I had the chance at least to do some exercise while I was there, because I knew that that would put me in a better mood. Even if it took me away from an hour's, you know, session I could have done on something else, I knew that that was of real value are there any examples you can think of where either that really worked or it didn't work oh gosh i can i mean i'm sure lots of things where i turned up and i wasn't in the best shape i remember flying to finland for something at some point and i had to do a call with california and the time difference was bigger than the usual sort of european time difference and i just sort of said to my boss you know i'm really sorry i just i was on a call with him I just I'm just not really able to do this now I don't think I can function I think I need to go to bed and of course he knew that what you know it was important for me to be functioning well he's like of course then we just do it another time yeah um but the way I've sort of always worked is I you know I honor my commitments yeah and so I could have done with the four d's then to sort of get you know what it's crazy for me to be doing this so that kind of thing helps really small little things like that it feels like you're letting someone down or you're failing in some way which is silly because I mean your point around really being present with people and and managing your time in a way that enables that is so important I had a solitary life lesson on that when I suppose was very early in my senior leadership journey maybe shortly after I became a director I I did a course which probably was the first time I got full 360 feedback so um you know that could be quite intimidating I I thought I liked feedback I do like feedback um it's a gift but it was the first time i'd done it you know anonymously so you got a really rounded picture of how people see you and of course there were lots of lovely things that they said but i was so taken aback that almost to a person every single every single bit of long-form feedback reference the fact that i was so busy and i was sort of mortified because i felt you know that may be true i had very young kids at the time um babies in fact but i i was horrified that that was so obvious to all of them and it i felt they must be self-regulating because they worry that i'm too busy to for them what do you mean by self-regulating well i um they must be not asking me for what they need right because they have this impression being so of me being so busy i can't possibly ask for help with this because i need to i need to just manage this because you know she's so busy yeah and i was just i was just mortified and so i worked on just the little cues around how I am like when I was going in and out of the office I didn't run yeah I mean that sounds bad doesn't it but I literally was running so quite a lot of the time um or I made sure that I when I went to get a cup of tea stopped and smiled and chatted um I in meetings would make sure that we had the full if it was an hour allocated the full hour without people feeling like I was sort of, you know, tapping my foot waiting for the next meeting to happen.

39:33If people ask how I was, it wasn't, I wouldn't say I'd lie, but I wouldn't lead with, oh, you know. I'm absolutely drowning.

39:41Matt Brittin:You don't want to say that. Frazzle, you know, but these little things can make a difference to how people feel about the time you have together. So it doesn't mean I spent any more time with them, but hopefully the quality of time that I did spend was better. and I do think that those are the little things that can just make a difference to the experience of how the people around you feel about your leadership. It was a great example of feedback being a real gift because you were able to take it and do something useful. Did the feedback change after that? Yeah, in fact, you know, almost full circle, just before I left my job at the end of the year, someone who'd worked at the academy several years previously just popped by to say hi.

40:22she just said spontaneously one thing that I always really appreciated was that you made me

40:28Matt Brittin:feel that you had time for it I was like oh wow it's a good turnaround did this by design no but it meant a lot to me it meant a lot to me well it makes me think exactly is my kind of analogy of going to visit people I don't see that often it's about being able to have those casual conversations and being seen as being approachable not just saying I'm approachable actually looking like I am. So Matt, one of the things I wanted to raise with you is that in theory, one of your best friends, as you pointed out with your four D's in terms of time management, is delegation. But there are actually some things that you can never really delegate as a leader.

41:03What do you think?

41:04Matt Brittin:Another great question. Well, what immediately comes to mind is people things. and the more leadership responsibility I got the more I realized that the highest impact thing you can do is find somebody good and put them in a position where they can make a difference and I may have mentioned this before but it was it was the Larry Page advice I got early on in my career put the best people on the most important work and get out of the way so I think that we don't spend anywhere near enough time in the world of work on ensuring we find the best people. And so if you think about it, you know, the amount of time a hiring manager puts into hiring somebody is actually relatively low, particularly if you're hiring from outside.

41:53Matt Brittin:It's quite hard to judge what somebody is going to be like. And, you know, we see a whole nother discussion. We see examples, don't we, we can talk about in the world around, you know, when's it time to say, OK, this was a mistake. But so I think for me, hiring a direct report or hiring somebody who was going to be a key person in the leadership organization, I would prioritize my time on that over anything. Same thing with coaching and, you know, tough performance conversations. I don't think I mean, you talked about when you look at what's coming up and you have anxiety. All of us have anxiety about having a tough performance conversation with somebody.

42:30Matt Brittin:I've never had one that I felt I shouldn't have done that I've always felt once it's done both for me and for the person receiving the tough feedback uh it's better it's out in the open so I think those things would be things that you could never delegate or you should never delegate yeah and I was just thinking as I was talking to you about I would listen to your answer that um in reality as a as a leader you know you've got a certain amount of time to allocate and there's not an absolute answer to what's the best way to allocate it. And it's kind of like a portfolio that over time you want to make sure that you're investing in the right places, but you don't have to in any one moment feel you've got the perfect formula.

43:12So I would sort of think over a period, you know, have I been very externally facing? Do I need to spend a little bit more time internally? Is there a part of the organization that needs a bit of love? have I split my time appropriately between the reactive and the long term? And, you know, like that kind of calibration of overall, when you look at the distribution of the way I'm spending my time, say in a week or a month, that's what matters rather than in an instant. So most things can be delegated when you really need them to in an instant, but maybe not over time as a whole. but that did also prompt my thought that um this is another of my i don't know i've got some sort of food thing going on i've got another food related metaphor for you um i'm getting a bit hungry though we should have eaten otherwise the metaphors would be on a completely different topic if we had right so my my um other metaphor in terms of time management is you can't recreate the whole pie through putting all the slices back together oh what does that mean that's obviously not a good metaphor.

44:21Matt Brittin:I've never had the chance, I've always eaten the slices, so I've never had the chance to try this in practice. If you're looking that confused, it's clearly not a good metaphor. So I guess there are certain things you can do in sort of a piecemeal way. And there are certain things that you could only do with chunks of time. And so you have to make sure that you have enough of the chunks of time, the things that take slow thinking um and i think we make a mistake sometimes by sort of trying to to snack on something which was never meant to be a snack it's meant to be a you know multi-course banquet and we just need to take our time over it and the most obvious one for that is the sort of the long-term strategic thinking where you pull yourself out of the reactive mode day-to-day and really think big picture and i just don't think that kind of stuff will get done properly unless you create space for it.

45:13What do you think?

45:14Matt Brittin:Well, firstly, I think... If I convince you of my metaphor... I now know what the metaphor means. I'm still going to eat most of the pie before it goes back in the tin. Okay, I'll try a new one next time. First thing it makes me think about is obviously there's a lot more research now about the cost of tasks switching. So like kind of trying to do a few emails between performance reviews and preparing a speech for something and calling a customer. Like it's just not good. So I think those sort of batch times... I should say I am an inveterate multitasker. Well, we can debate about gender and multitasking another time.

45:43Matt Brittin:I think the evidence says that almost nobody is good at multitasking. I think we're definitely not as good as we think we are when we're multitasking. But sometimes I still find, I still find helpful about multitasking. You don't think when you're trying to move forward and you hit a roadblock. I would rather do something else when I hit a roadblock than just sit and try and get over the roadblock. Yeah. So I think that's an interesting one. That's about kind of changing the context so that maybe in your subconscious you can work through it. But I mean, in fairness, if anybody could multitask, I would believe that you could.

46:13Matt Brittin:So I think we'll do the research there. When you think about having blocks of time for things, really important. Another thing you kind of alluded to is, like, should your calendar reflect directly a correlation with the most important things? So say you've got like five things to do. Should you be able to go, well, I'm spending my time equally across all five? I don't think so. And here's why. I think it's good to be able to be clear on your priorities and make sure you're spending time on them. But I always used to say to people, and I really think I learned this myself, you don't have to do everything in parallel.

46:48Matt Brittin:So in Google and in many kind of tech organizations, there's a sort of focus on quarterly cycles. And I think that's a good time period, actually, for most human activity, because in a week you might not move the ball forward. But in a quarter, you probably can. So I would sort of be really thoughtful about, you know, of the four or five big themes that I'm trying to drive all year round. In this quarter, I need to deprioritize, I don't know, customer meetings in order to make sure I build the operations around this thing. And so I think you don't necessarily want to see kind of a mapping of priorities to time.

47:23Matt Brittin:Also, like most of the time for me, if I needed to intervene in the core business, something was going badly wrong. So I should probably not be spending a huge amount of my time on the day-to-day operations that are well built and being managed by thousands of people. I want to spend my time on looking over the horizon. So I don't know, there's a few thoughts there about how the calendar reflects what you're doing. So if I move it from, say, the CEO to the senior team, I would say the calendar of the senior team should be a good representation of what matters the organisation. And the reality is no CEO is really achieving anything at all in isolation.

48:00it's always a team effort. And actually on that point, one of the things I try to be really strict about with myself was meetings that say, you know, our weekly executive leadership team meeting or our senior leadership team meetings, which were less frequent, but longer and had a bigger group. I try to be really strict, not rescheduling those unless I had to, always showing up on time, showing that they were my priority. Otherwise, how could I expect them to be other people's priority so i do think that your calendar is important and how good your calendar is at kind of describing what you're actually doing is important like that consistency but i love your

48:40Matt Brittin:build though about the team looking across the team i think that's a really strong one and so on average over a three to six month period across the team you should be kind of making sure you're managing all of those things right absolutely absolutely agree one of the things i found helpful across my career but particularly in this context is to just say to people you know i'm struggling with this what do you think what's your view quite often i ask my team you know what where do you think i should be spending my time and what i found was quite often they were encouraging me to sort of get my head out of the detail and do the stuff that only i could do like hiring this new thing fixing this thing that's broken thinking about the two to three year plan rather than the in quarter plan now in some cases you've got to watch out right that might just be don't look what i'm doing it's absolutely fine uh don't dig nothing to see here so you need to kind of have the the bullshit detector on but actually asking your team you know how we're feeling about where we're spending our time what I could be doing as the boss I found really really helpful and actually encouraging me to be a better leader yeah and I used to kind of make sure there was transparency with my board as well where I'd give them an overview of meetings I was having I'm not like every internal meeting but it gave them a sense of where's my time going and what's a what's a network that I'm investing in externally and I think that's important because ultimately leadership is a shared endeavour.

49:56And so if everyone is aligned and has visibility of how prioritisation is kind of being converted to action in terms of where we're spending our time, that makes for a good basis of alignment and trust.

50:08Matt Brittin:Yeah, that point about sharing upwards as well reminds me, you know, when I started in tech, until the week I finished, I would send my boss end of week email. Oh, nice. And you might think, well, what were you doing doing that when you were like, you know, running a big complicated organisation? actually well it was was not here's everything i've done yeah it would be two or three interesting things maybe one thing where i need your help on this and a couple of what am i doing next and i found it really helpful for me to kind of put a shutter down on the week just gone and get my head straight about the week to come it's quite useful a bit like your kind of um how do i think about my four quadrants of what i need to do but also it gave my boss just a flavor of how i was spending my time what I was hearing and it meant when we got to a one-to-one he or she would be able to go hey what was that tell me a bit about the insight there that was interesting to me or I've already looked at this thing and it's happening I'd ask my team to do it I wouldn't be too rigorous about exactly how some people love doing it some people never really did it very much but for me it was a tool that really worked such a really interesting example think about time this way if somebody came and audited the way you spent your time like a tax return which would be the hardest bit to justify?

51:22Oh, God, my scrolling.

51:25Matt Brittin:Doom scrolling. Well, on LinkedIn mostly, but also, you know, news sites and things. I mean, I don't think you can run an organisation without collecting all of this information from the world around you and harvesting it through scrolling can actually be productive, I tell myself. what about you i think the stuff that's hardest to justify for me or might seem hardest to justify to a sort of hard-nosed school of management person actually quite often the most valuable stuff sitting in a cafe randomly sitting next to people you don't know and asking them what they're up to um reading a book that's not directly related to what's going on um just taking a bit of time out to pause and breathe and reflect before something taking a moment to process something.

52:13Matt Brittin:So quite often, it's the little shards of time around the day, where the intel or the idea or somebody comes up to you in an unguarded moment, those things actually help you understand the culture and the issues in an organisation also help you, I think, make better decisions. So the shards of time are hard to justify. But without them, I'm not sure how things work. I totally agree. The value of processing time is wildly underestimated. What are the most socially acceptable ways that you think people are wasting time at work right now? I think meetings. Meetings are often a colossal waste of time.

52:48Matt Brittin:Here's why. There are three meetings that happen. There's the meeting on the way to the meeting room, the meeting in the meeting, which is usually overprepared and doesn't really do anything that didn't happen before the meeting, and the meeting after the meeting where everyone's relaxed and you find out what you're really going to do. So I think you can, in many cases, cut out the actual meeting itself and just have the walk from the elevator to the meeting room. What are you doing? What's going on? Social connection and the meeting afterwards. What does that really mean? What are we really going to do?

53:15Matt Brittin:That's the way to save a lot of time at work. Well, I don't know if I can better that one.

53:26Matt Brittin:So here's a question that says, hi, I'm five years into my career and I want to know what's one time management habit that I should build early? Prioritisation. thinking intentionally about honestly what's the most useful thing you could do with your time right now so many of us just do the thing we want to do but honestly it will serve you so well if you get in the habit of doing the thing that really deserves to be done first first couldn't be clearer okay i've got another audience question for you matt um if i'm building something big is sacrificing sleep worthwhile i gotta say i am religious about sleep um being tired is a huge load and you're not at your best cognitively physically it's been proven actually that you're you're you're actively not so good looking if you're tired which is of course i recommend it to everyone i work with to read why we sleep by matt walker i actually did an interview with him as well which is on youtube is a fascinating sleep researcher and basically once you read that you realize you've got to get sleep if you want to be creative if you want to solve problems if you want to learn stuff if you want to influence people sleep is everything just to cheer up those people who might for legitimate reasons not be able to get as much sleep as they want i do also think that you know if you're not having a great night's sleep one night doesn't mean the next day is going to be disaster like when i had kids i would go to work like dragging myself there having had two hours sleep and then i would be so engrossed in my work i completely forget and i don't even remember when i was on my way home again i think oh my god i felt dreadful this morning yeah because i actually do think that there are times when just having that intensity of focus kind of pulls you through and we all know that there are times as well where you just have to knuckle down and push on through traveling you know when you're in relentless flights here and there we can all do it but it's not sustainable if you do it all the time i had two kids under two and And my memories from that period of work are all in black and white because I was running on low energy.

55:27Matt Brittin:We're getting, you know, broken night's sleep. It was really, really hard. Low power mood. You look around you and you think these bastards who aren't parents, like how on earth do they get away with having all this extra energy? So there are always kind of crunchy periods, which is where it's harder. And it's amazing what you can do when you're time constrained. I think I became better at prioritizing when my kids were really young as a result of, you know, just wanting to make sure I could be there for them, too. Absolutely. It's a zero sum game, isn't it, when you've got young kids? The time you don't spend at work is, you know, time with your family and vice versa.

55:58So it makes it a much clearer choice where you put that dividing line.

56:03Matt Brittin:Final thought on sleep. I think absolutely. From time to time, there are crunches, there's travel and so on. And you have to pull, you know, have to pull something out of the bank of sleep. But if on average, you're not sleeping well, that's a real problem for your health, but also for your family and your social life and your productivity. I worked in consulting for a while and there was a culture there of working all hours. And you go back and stand in front of a room full of consultants and they're all dead behind the eyes from lack of sleep. That is not a good way to advise your clients on brilliant strategies, in my humble opinion.

56:35So, Matt, that's been a really interesting foray into time management and how we get the most out of our time as leaders. Definitely taking me to some places I wasn't expecting. um so what do we know now about time i think some things that struck me um getting

56:54Matt Brittin:the pressures of time out of your head and into a system whether it's paper quadrants calendars or colored pens allows you to be relieved from the stresses of time and start to take control over it i think that control word is so important we never really are in control of time but there are things that we can do to make ourselves feel that we do have agency and we're not at the mercy of it and I think exactly as you've said things that bring structure the opportunity to visualize the opportunity to segment all those things help us to prioritize and feel less overwhelmed by it. I remember when I was consulting somebody saying to me don't just tell people you're busy because everyone's busy you've got to say I'm absolutely drowning drowning but when you feel like you're drowning I think what we know now is that there are ways to ask for help from people who may not even know any of the context that you're in that can make a difference.

57:52Matt Brittin:I think also what we know now is there's macro and micro time and one of the key things as a leader is when you're there to be really present and how you use the time around those set pieces to make sure that people feel that you're approachable and you're able to listen and to be at your best? Yeah, my version of that is fast time and slow time. Oh, great. So, you know, there are times when you have to maximize productivity, you know, don't rock backwards and forwards on your heel, just go on and do that jump. And then there are times when you have to slow things down and create space for people to feel really present and in the moment.

58:26And although that might sound a bit abstract, there are really practical things that we can do to help make that real.

58:33Matt Brittin:There is nothing else but time. As a leader, that's all you've got. Unfortunately, we're out of time now. So join us next time for more conversations and to learn more about what we don't know about being great leaders. Thanks so much for joining us. And please do follow along on socials. We want to hear from you. Let us know what your experience is of managing time. Thank you.