Time

We’re scrambling at the moment to figure out a way back to Europe, as an enormous cloud of volcanic ash has closed many of the airports in the region. It makes me realize, again, how valuable time is for all of us. In the end, it is the most important resource we have.

Someone asked me the other day at a meeting, “Admiral, you travel so much and do a lot of writing in addition to all the other things you have going on. How do you manage your time?” A pretty good question and it is actually something I’ve given a great deal of thought to over the years.

First of all, I’ve always tried hard to manage my time carefully, and to use small bits of time to chip away at important things. If you wait until you have six hours to sit down and write an article, the odds are that you’ll never find the time. But if you write a page or a paragraph here and there – while on an airplane or in a car ride – eventually you’ll have a good piece. Do that in an organized way over a year, and you’ll have a book. What seems like a big commitment in time is so often just a series of small steps.

Second, I try to budget my time in big strokes. I learned this from former Chief of Naval Operations Admiral Vern Clark, who is a disciplined and focused manager as well as a strong leader. He always talked about dividing your time into the three big things you do – in my case, I’ve generally broken it down into five:

• People. No surprise this is at the top of the list, and I think it is the most important thing I do every day. It spans the gamut from counseling and guiding my team, to recruiting new talented people, to focusing on quality of life issues. I get a lot of help, of course, from my personnel experts and my Senior Enlisted Leaders, but in the end, I’d put this at the top of any leader’s time budget. For me, I try to invest about 25 percent of the time on my people.


• Learning. One of the key skills any leader must have is the ability to constantly learn. Like most people running big organizations, I take in enormous amounts of information and try hard to absorb the important details as well as understand the strategic “big picture” that confronts my two commands. I think it is important as well to invest in learning languages, so I typically spend an hour each day studying a language –Spanish, French, and Portuguese are my focus at the moment. This also includes time to read, both non-fiction and fiction books – in other words to get up above the day-to-day intelligence and staff reports, as important as they are. I try to get through about 50 novels and 50 non-fiction books each year, roughly two books per week. Lots of time on airplanes helps out! This is an area that absorbs about 25 percent of my time.


• Messaging. A big part of what I do is strategic communication. In this, I include the roughly 100 speeches and presentations I do each year, from think tanks to town halls, from testifying in front of Congress to briefing the North Atlantic Council. I also try to write about five articles each year for publication, focusing on a wide variety of journals and media outlets. My work on social networking sites, this blog, and other forms of outreach and communication come into this segment of my time budget, which is about 25 percent.


• Operations. My job as SACEUR is essentially the Operations Officer for NATO; and of course in my U.S. European Command hat we are constantly conducting operations around the region. It therefore stands to reason that I’d spend a fair amount of time in this area. This really consists of briefings, meetings, and actually engagement in the conduct of operations. While this varies from time-to-time, it normally takes up about 15 percent of my time.


• Innovation. I try very hard to block out time to work on innovative ideas. This includes spending time just thinking and writing about new ways of doing things, from how we process information to creating new centers for everything from counter-narcotics to disposal of dangerous ordnance. In the end, if I am enslaved by the process of the day-to-day – as important as it is – I think I’m missing the chance to move my enterprise in a dramatic way forward. This uses up the final 10 percent of the disposal time.

Obviously, what I don’t include in the time above is my family, friends, and work-outs – I’m talking about budgeting the *disposable* time available. In everything, balance is key, and anyone who knows me is aware I find time for leave, family time and physical fitness; perhaps not as much as I would always like, but in general I think I am “in balance” on that side of the ledger.

The final point I would make about time management is simple but often overlooked: I measure how I’m doing on my time budget. In other words, every month or so, I’ll review the schedule with the team and we’ll try to ensure that we’re hitting the gates above. Some months we’ll miss the target because a big operation will eat up an inordinate amount of time; other months we’ll pretty much be on target. But the key is that by measuring how we’re doing, I’m able to maintain some accountability to myself for the really big ticket items (like innovation) that can easily be swept away.

So as we’re held up in Washington at the moment awaiting the skies over Europe to clear, I have a little extra time on my hands – time for some messaging, i.e. writing this post to my blog!

Admiral James Stavridis
Commander, U.S. European Command and
Supreme Allied Commander Europe