Don't Drop the Ball: A Reflection on Time Management as a Business Leader

Time management has been a problem for as long as humans have had responsibilities. The only thing that changes is the packaging. Today it's apps and gurus. Before that it was planners, notepads, and your mother yelling up the stairs.

I'm not writing this as someone who has it "solved." I'm writing this as someone who finally stopped pretending I'll magically become the kind of person who never forgets, never procrastinates, and never gets distracted.

Over 20 years in the Marine Corps taught me something simple: you don't build a plan on best-case behavior. You build it to survive real conditions—fatigue, stress, distraction, and friction. Then the last four decades of life taught me the more personal version: I know my own weaknesses, and ignoring them is just ego.

So my time management strategy is built on containment: protect what matters, catch what slips, and recover fast.

Glass Balls and Rubber Balls

When life gets busy (which is most of the time), I use one analogy to keep myself honest.

Glass balls break when you drop them. Rubber balls bounce.

Leadership—at home or in business—means you don't get to pretend everything is glass. If you treat it that way, you'll burn yourself into the ground and still disappoint the people who actually rely on you.

Glass balls usually look like:

• Health
• Family
• Trust
• Commitments where someone else pays the price if you slip

Rubber balls are the ones that feel loud but don't actually shatter:

• Inbox perfection
• Polishing something past "good enough"
• A lot of "urgent" admin work
• Meetings that could have been a message

That's the whole game for me: protect the glass, accept that some rubber will hit the floor, and keep moving.

I Assume I Will Forget—Because I Will

I've learned the hard way that memory is not a strategy.

I know I'll forget things. I know I'll procrastinate. I know I'll get distracted. That's not self-pity; it's forecasting. Forecasting lets you build guardrails.

So I build redundancy on purpose. Notes. Task lists. Calendar reminders. Time blocks. Sometimes multiple reminders for the same thing, because a single point of failure is how you end up apologizing to a client—or worse, your family.

For anyone who thinks that's "too much," there's a term for it in the research world: cognitive offloading. It's the practice of pushing some remembering and tracking into the environment—lists, alarms, reminders—so your brain doesn't have to carry it all.

Procrastination Isn't Always a Character Flaw

I'm not going to pretend procrastination is always noble. Sometimes it's avoidance, and avoidance will wreck you.

But there's another version that looks like procrastination from the outside and feels different on the inside: you don't have clarity yet, so you circle the problem while it cooks in the background.

That "incubation" effect shows up in creativity research, including evidence that moderate procrastination can sometimes support creativity under certain conditions.

For me, the leadership lesson is simple: don't confuse motion with progress. Some problems need thought before action.

The Most Effective Reminder System I Have Is My Wife

Here's the funny part: one of my best tools isn't an app.

It's my wife.

She'll give me gentle reminders when she knows something important is coming up, or when she can tell I'm drifting. Just a small nudge back toward the rails.

It's helpful. It's humbling. And yes, it's occasionally annoying—mostly because she's usually right.

Also, if you're doing the math, this means my wife has become an unpaid executive assistant for my brain. I do not recommend this as a business model, but it works.

Why This Matters as a Leader

If you lead anything—your household, a team, a business—your time management failures don't stay private. They leak. They become other people's stress.

The goal is to keep the right balls in the air and make sure the important people in your world don't pay for your preventable mistakes.

I'll always be managing my time, not mastering it. The difference now is that I'm building around reality instead of arguing with it.