Why protecting your time is the most important skill to hone – especially when you’re managing a team

This is how a woman’s competence starts functioning like a company’s communal property. At first, the talent is rewarded. You answer before anyone has to chase you. You volunteer. You become the person trusted with one more thing – until dependability starts resembling an all-you-can-eat buffet for everyone around you.

Eventually, the math turns. The job gets larger, while the day remains irritatingly fixed at 24 hours. A child arrives. The team expands. The real skill here isn’t squeezing more into limited time, but rather, developing a certain ruthlessness about what deserves to enter it at all.

Which leads us to ask: When, exactly, does availability stop looking like competence?

Over-functioning takes a toll

Praise Tan, Singapore country manager of Crimson Education, leads a team of about 40 across more than 20 time zones, which makes “available” a dangerously elastic word. “When I first stepped into the country manager role at 28, I was working 80-hour weeks. At the time, I thought leadership meant being constantly available and solving every problem in real time.”

This worked, until it didn’t. “Every time I took a break, spent time with family or went on holiday, I would fall severely ill. It felt like my body was operating in a constant state of high alert, and the moment I tried to rest, it would shut down.”

Leanne Robers, co-founder of She Loves Tech, recognises the pattern. “There are periods in a start-up when everybody has to sprint, but you cannot run an entire company as though every day is an emergency. The body is designed to mobilise under stress and then recover. Founders are often very good at the first part and terrible at the second.” She knows the lag herself. After the intensity of 2020, she recalls: “My mind knew the crisis was over, but my body had not caught up.”

The problem is that speed is easy to mistake for value. Grace Chua, South-east Asia’s head of communications at OpenAI, says: “Earlier in my career, I often thought being quick to respond or getting something done immediately meant I was doing well at my job.” Now, she says: “I’m much clearer about what actually requires my attention at that moment, and not everything is urgent.”

There are only 24 hours in a day

Jasmine Yong, founder of hair removal salon Sugar(ed), had been running her business for roughly a decade before motherhood last year introduced a new sort of deadline. “I used to be involved in so many small decisions simply because I could be,” she says. Then time stopped being something infinitely stretchable.

“Having less time forced me to ask a very simple question: ‘Does this actually need me?’” The answer, inconveniently for anyone who has built a business by being capable of almost everything, was often no.

She adds: “Sometimes, the most productive thing I can do for the business is get out of the way and let the people I’ve hired do their jobs.”

Niccole Chan-Ravel, managing partner of Luxe Catering, arrived at the same conclusion as her team grew to around 30 people.

There is a particular elegance to this trap. The better you are at fixing things, the more efficiently problems find you. “If everything has to be perfect and everything has to pass through me, then the business can only grow as far as my own capacity allows,” Niccole says.

Praise had to make a similar adjustment. “It took me time to realise that perfectionism isn’t the same as good leadership,” she shares. Seniority changes the economics of attention. The question shifts from ‘Can I do this?’ to ‘Why am I the one doing it?’.

Jasmine puts the consequence neatly: “If the business can only function when I’m involved in every decision, then I haven’t built a very strong business.”

Not all tasks are urgent - even if they may seem like it

Of course, all of this would be much easier if genuinely urgent things had the decency to look different from merely loud ones. “The first thing is to understand that urgency is sometimes a very convincing feeling, and it may not always be a fact,” says Leanne. But there is physiology behind the drama. “When we are highly stressed or feel threatened, the nervous system becomes mobilised. Our attention narrows around the perceived threat, while the prefrontal functions involved in planning, evaluating options and cognitive flexibility become less effective.”

That creates two problems: First, we react to whatever is directly in front of us. Second, because it has captured our attention, we assume it must be the most important thing.

Leanne circumvents this by creating some distance before deciding what deserves action. Once she is regulated, she asks a useful set of questions for any message that arrives with three exclamation marks: “Does this have a real deadline? What actually happens if I wait? Am I uniquely required here? Is this strategically important, or has it simply made me uncomfortable?”

Smart management strategies

For Grace, working from Singapore with colleagues across the US and Europe means the working day is theoretically available at almost any hour, which is useful right up until geography begins behaving like a particularly demanding colleague.

Unsurprisingly, the communications head at OpenAI harnesses the power of AI. “Every morning at 8am, it sends me a readout of what I’ve missed overnight, including the important updates, what I need to know, and what I should prioritise,” Grace says of the ChatGPT Work brief she uses to catch up on activity across her calendar and inbox. “For calls that happen overnight, I ask myself whether I genuinely need to be there live. If the purpose is to stay informed, there are often other ways to do that.”

Praise, who also works across time zones, has reached the same idea from another direction. “I’m no longer looking at it simply as: How can I do this faster? Instead, I’m asking, ‘Do I need to be doing this at all?’” She uses AI to take repetitive administrative work off her plate, including meeting summaries and action items. This may be the more sophisticated version of efficiency – not doing things faster, but arranging for certain things to stop requiring you at all.

She adds that boundaries are also becoming less about fixed hours and more about hierarchy of importance. “I’ve had to shift my thinking from setting strict work-hour boundaries to setting priority-based boundaries.” And when the requests start arriving en masse, she adopts the following strategy: “I ask myself: Does this genuinely need me to step away from my strategic work or family time right now?”

Grace makes some of those choices visible. “If I need focus time, I block it. If I’m picking up my son or have childcare duties, I block that too.”

The boundary matters for everyone else as well. “I might be working after I’ve put my son to bed, but that doesn’t mean someone else needs to receive a message from me at 10 pm or feel they need to respond,” she adds.

Before becoming a mother, Jasmine says: “Time always felt expandable. Having a baby changed that almost overnight. Suddenly, my time had much greater value outside work too.”

Niccole knows the feeling. “Before children, it was easy to let work expand into whatever space was available,” she says. Now, protected time can be very ordinary. For Niccole, it means “being able to pick my girls up from school when I can, being home in the evenings, and tucking them into bed.”

None of this requires pretending that work and family can be portioned into immaculate daily halves. Grace abandoned that arithmetic some time ago. “I used to imagine that balance meant giving work and family equal weight every day, but I’ve realised that’s not very realistic. These days, I think about it across a month, rather than within every single day.”

You need room to think

There is another reason leaders need space, and it has nothing to do with school pick-ups. “If every hour is filled, the brain is constantly executing but rarely integrating,” explains Leanne. “You may become incredibly efficient at completing tasks, while becoming less effective at deciding whether those tasks should exist at all.”

It may be the least glamorous argument ever made for white space in a calendar, but perhaps the most persuasive. The woman who can fit everything in eventually has to learn the most difficult art: leaving something out.