Self Management for Effective Leaders

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How should you manage your time?

In one sentence: A leader’s job is to ensure the team produces the outcomes that matter most to the company.

To break this down, there are four key areas:

Objective: Identifying what’s important and what’s not.

Strategy: Creating a step-by-step plan to achieve the objective.

Executive Management: Ensuring everyone is rowing in the same direction and removing bottlenecks.

People Management: Maintaining morale, positioning people for success, and managing hiring and firing.

Objective

I spend at least 40% of my most productive hours reading, learning, and analyzing the market and technology trends. This is to ensure we have an objective that’s both feasible and critical. I can’t stress this enough: leaders need to spend more time thinking about what to do than simply doing things. This is particularly important in this era, when things change in a rate which we can’t imagine. Keep doing something that’s not important has huge opportunity costs.

Strategy

Once you have an objective (or your boss gives you one), strategy becomes essential. Great outcomes rarely happen in one strike. You need a clear step-by-step plan to achieve the goal. Without this, you risk harming your team’s performance and morale when early attempts fail. Developing strategy also falls under the 40% of time spent on thinking and planning.

Executive Management

This is the least glamorous part of leadership—it’s repetitive, action-heavy, and often boring. But it compounds over time. You get better at it day by day.

I spend my “not-so-productive” hours here: listening to reports, talking to users, speaking with frontline developers, and using the product myself. I minimize indirect reports because they make me lose touch with the ground truth. If a product is underperforming, don’t delegate your way out of the problem—use it yourself and talk to users. Lead by example so your team does the same.

People Management

People management rarely feels urgent until something goes wrong—like when you need to fire someone or deal with attrition. When it becomes a problem, however, it should be your top priority.

Sam Altman once said the highest ROI for a leader is in hiring. My contrarian view is that I don’t trust HR for this task—not just here but in general. Hiring is too important to delegate to someone who has little understanding of your business. The risk is too high.

Use HR as a tool: let them handle logistics like posting jobs and managing processes. But as a leader, you should proactively seek out great talent yourself. You should know where to find the best people because you are one of them.

How should you manage your reports

This question depends heavily on your personality and the type of business you're running. For example, my leader doesn’t endorse all of my methods—he has his philosophy, and it works for him but not quite for me. My approach is rooted in two principles:

Being Detail-Oriented

Being Importance-Oriented

1. Being Detail-Oriented

Being detail-oriented does not mean micromanaging. For a better understanding, you can refer to my blog on

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Brian Chesky and Founder Mode .Being detail-oriented means you need to know as much as possible—if not all—about the projects you're overseeing, both technical and non-technical. This is easier than it sounds.

However, you must control the urge to manage every detail directly. If you fail to do this, you'll make life miserable for the people working for you and, worse, erode their initiative—which is critical to building a sustainable organization.

Being detail-oriented also requires that you talk directly to the people doing the actual work, not their managers. Bureaucracy thrives when you need to talk to a VP, who then relays the request to a middle manager, who finally asks the people writing the code. This chain is inefficient and prone to information loss.

Skipping the reporting line is often treated as a taboo in many organizations. But I believe this taboo exists mainly to protect incompetent managers. The people on the front lines are what I call the ground truth of your business. You have no excuse not to access that truth directly.

One huge advantage of being detail-oriented is that you can use your unique influence to unblock bottlenecks. Businesses often stall not because the people are incompetent but because they face obstacles they can't resolve on their own. Due to bureaucracy or inertia, they might not ask for help, allowing these bottlenecks to persist. As a leader, being detail-oriented allows you to identify and eliminate these issues effectively.

2. Being Importance-Oriented

Being importance-oriented means ensuring that most of your team’s efforts are directed toward solving the most important problem at any given time. A common mistake is when people work hard but on things that don’t matter, leading to poor outcomes overall.

This is a task only leaders can do because it requires having a broader perspective of the entire business to determine what’s important and what’s not.

Being detail-oriented helps here, too. You can only verify whether your team is working on the most critical problem if you’re close to the details. Without this connection, you risk leading the team in the wrong direction.