The world’s most successful leaders, Jobs, Leahy, Branson, Obama, Calver, etc all have something in common…they all engineer time out.

And, they all get (or got in the case of late Steve Jobs) that, being too busy to do so is totally irrational.

With the start of the next Leadership Team on Wednesday, I wanted to reflect on why this is so important…nowadays, more than ever.

So, here’s a bunch of things that don’t get done if leaders are too busy – see how many of them you can honestly say you do have in hand:

1. Achieving total clarity of what your organisation has a passion for doing for who
2. Developing, communicating and consistently sticking to a clear set of values
3. Developing the strategy and deploying it down through the whole structure
4. Thinking through who you need on the team and who needs to get off the bus
5. Designing systems that generate cash flow with every customer gained
6. Spending time talking to customers and keeping abreast of market changes
7. Driving innovation that gives customers an even better service / product
8. Rewarding and recognising those who are achieving great value
9. Inspiring the next generation of leaders in and outside of your organisation
10. Thinking about, researching and trying to see the future of your industry

With a 100 e-mails (including this one!) coming in a day, reports to read through, meetings to attend and fires to put out, it is easy to miss this time, yet time spent on the above will pay back many times over.

So, do you engineer enough of this time?  Maybe you feel that you can and do engineer it alone, others will have a great board, others mentors or coaches and those starting next week’s Leadership Team will also have this time in the company of a peer group of leaders.

However you engineer it, it is the most valuable time you spend…never urgent, but more important than anything else.