For years we’ve heard that time management is about quadrants, action items, and prioritizing tasks. In fact, go to just about time management seminar, and the trainer will spend lots of time showing you how to analyze your calendar, log your time spent in activities, plan your workweek, etc. And at such a seminar you’ll likely realize that you do indeed spend too much time on e-mail, on the phone, and on urgent activities (fire fighting). So you’ll plan your calendar better, define your activities in quadrants, and prioritize your workload. But then the trainer leaves, and within a week you fall right back into your place on the treadmill.

Why does this happen? Because no matter what your actual job is, you likely tend to do those things that you think your boss expects you to do. Very often, these expectations come before the important tasks you need to do. And while communication and helping senior management is important, if you’re truly going to have the time to spend on tasks that move the company forward, then you’re going to need to gain more power over your schedule and apply it to your day.

Rather than reel with interruption after interruption, you need to have a conversation with your boss about the various activities you are expected to do. The purpose of this dialogue is for both of you to reach agreement on what success is. Then, you must constantly manage expectations.

Manage Your Manager, Not Your Time
The goal is to achieve complete alignment between what your boss wants and perhaps needs you to do and what you believe you really should do. Here’s how you do it:

1. Analyze your bosses’ needs. You need to know what your bosses expect of themselves and what your boss’s boss expects of him. What goals do your bosses have? What can you do to help them be more successful?

Unfortunately, a lot of people in business assume that “meeting the boss’s needs” means doing exactly what the boss wants them to do—accepting the boss’s vision and direction wholesale. Wrong! This assumption is a little to simplistic and dangerous. It sets the stage for aligning one’s lips with their boss’s backsides rather than meeting the needs that’ll actually make a difference.

Real “managing upward” demands a more serious and subtle analysis of human needs, which starts with the realization that needs come in two forms—explicit needs and implicit needs.

Explicit needs are easier to understand. They may be stated in the strategic plan diffused by the company or the division, or they may be announced by your boss whenever the team gets together for the all-too-often strategy session. They may sound something like this:
• “We need to expand our business internationally.”
• “We need to create a shipping policy that will save us some money.”
• “We need to commerce-enable our Web site.”
Implicit needs are more subtle. People don’t talk about them. Sometimes they’re not even aware of them. Most of the time they are things that people would deny if confronted with them. They sound like this:
• “Make me look good in front of my boss so that when he gets kicked upstairs he’ll recommend me for his job.”
• “Help me demonstrate my creativity by coming up with some ideas for next year’s marketing campaign that I can tweak a little and take on as my own.”
• “Help me feel more like a leader and less like the kid who was always picked last in the schoolyard basketball games.”

While explicit needs tend to run a linear path, implicit needs tend be random, triggered by emotion and circumstance. And although you will never actually talk to your boss about his or her implicit needs, it’s a fun exercise to sit down with a sheet of paper and try listing your boss’s implicit needs. Paying attention to implicit needs is serious, as these often drive the issues that’ll keep us up at night. From the first day you meet your new boss through the last day you work together, devote enough of your time and thinking to really understanding you boss’s implicit needs. Then spend time on the needs that you can feel good about supporting to further your company’s interest as well as your boss’s career.

In order to take back your time, your life, and your career, you need to step into the realm of managing your manager, thereby altering their expectations related to your time.