Who Do You Allow to Waste Your Time?

At a Think Tank session, someone posed a question that stopped the room: “Who do you allow to waste your time?”

City managers and county administrators sat with it. Not because time management was a new topic, but because the framing was different. It wasn’t asking about scheduling systems or productivity tools. It was asking about self-awareness: what does the pattern of your interruptions reveal about your priorities, your boundaries, and what you’re quietly allowing?

What the Pattern Usually Shows

Wasted time in local government tends to accumulate in recognizable ways: unscheduled conversations that could have been an email, recurring meetings with no clear decision to make, problems that land on the leader’s desk because no one below them feels confident deciding. Each instance is small. The pattern, looked at honestly, tells a story about what the leader has and hasn’t made clear.

The questions worth sitting with aren’t complicated. Is this task genuinely urgent, or does it feel urgent because it’s immediate? Am I handling this because it aligns with my priorities, or because I want to avoid conflict? Have I created enough clarity with my team about what decisions they can make without me?

That last question is where the accountability tends to surface. When leaders examine where their time actually goes, they often find that some portion of the interruption pattern traces back to their own decisions: about expectations they set, about what they’ve modeled, about what they’ve tolerated over time.

The Connection to Define What Matters

A calendar is an honest document. It shows what actually mattered, not what the leader said mattered. When strategic priorities show up in the planning presentation but not in how the week runs, that gap is worth examining.

Define What Matters isn’t a scheduling exercise. It’s the work of naming what the organization actually stands for under pressure, and letting that answer govern decisions about time, attention, and access. Leaders who have done that work tend to find boundary-setting less fraught, because “no” stops being personal and becomes consistent with a stated position.

Without that clarity, every request becomes a negotiation. The calendar fills with what’s urgent to others, not what’s important to the organization.

What Makes Boundaries Hard to Hold

Even leaders who know their priorities find boundaries difficult to enforce in practice. Part of that is external: local government operates in a political environment where availability signals responsiveness, and declining a request can carry a cost. But part of it is internal to the organization itself.

When Circle of Safety is weak, problems flow upward. People escalate because they don’t trust that appropriate boundaries will be respected, or because the cost of being wrong feels too high. Leaders end up absorbing work that belongs elsewhere, not because they’re poor at delegation, but because the conditions that would make delegation safe haven’t been built. The time problem and the safety problem are the same problem.

Modeled behavior matters here. When a leader holds their own boundaries consistently, starts meetings on time, protects focused work blocks, declines low-priority requests, it signals to the organization that time is treated as a resource worth protecting. That signal compounds.

A Practical Starting Point

Leaders who have worked through this in Think Tanks tend to start with a single honest audit: look at the last two weeks of the calendar and name what was strategic versus reactive. No analysis required. Just the pattern, visible in its own terms.

What the pattern shows tends to be more instructive than any planning session. It reveals not what the leader intends, but what the organization has learned to expect. Closing the gap between those two things is where Face the Truth begins, and where Make It Real picks up with the structural changes that protect what actually matters.

Framework Connection

The question this article starts with is a Define What Matters question: does your calendar match what you say your priorities are? Face the Truth provides the honest assessment of the current pattern, including the leader’s own role in creating it. Make It Real builds the conditions that protect strategic time over the long term.

Research Foundation

• Workforce Expectations – Understanding the disconnect between what employees need and what organizations provide
• Political Dynamics – Why clear boundaries strengthen rather than weaken trust in public service contexts