Meetings that run over are costing you roughly five hours and $2,000 every single month, and three simple shifts can fix that. Lia walks through the agenda, the parking lot, and the end-of-meeting timer as a repeatable system to end on time, every time. This episode is most useful for owners, founders, and team leads who want to reclaim time without overhauling how their team works.
This episode is part of the 1:1s, Meetings & Time Management series. Browse all episodes →
Mic drop moments
“…the saddest thing that I heard in those focus groups this week was folks feeling like their manager is overwhelmed and they need help.”
“The manager is supposed to be that foundation, that rock, that person that’s got it figured out.”
“…not have to use your laptop as a placemat when you’re eating lunch. All of these things can happen when you make these little shifts.”
Episode highlights
When your team notices you’re drowning before you do
This episode came directly out of Lia’s annual focus groups with a large tech client. Every year she interviews roughly 200 people across the team and identifies one or two specific actions leadership can take. This year, time management showed up as the dominant theme, but the surprising part was not managers saying they felt stretched. It was individual contributors saying, “I notice my manager seems overwhelmed. My manager doesn’t have time to meet with me.”
That is the line. When the people you lead are worried about you, the problem is no longer just internal. It is permeating the whole team. And even if your team has not said it out loud yet, Lia argues they have noticed. The duck looks calm on the surface; everyone can see the legs kicking underneath.
Start with a calendar audit (and do it monthly)
Most leaders spend a majority of their time in meetings, which makes the calendar the single highest-leverage place to start. Lia recommends a monthly audit with three questions for every recurring meeting: Do you actually need to be there? Could it be biweekly instead of weekly? Could 60 minutes become 30, or 30 become 15?
The goal is not to slash everything. If you need a two-hour block, take it. The goal is to stop defaulting to whatever length you used last time. Done consistently, this audit alone can free up one to three hours a week.
Meeting hygiene: agendas, right people, clear outcomes
Every meeting should have an agenda. Every meeting should have the right people in the room so decisions can actually get made. Lia calls this meeting hygiene, and it compounds fast. Short, focused, well-run meetings are not just a time saver; they signal to your team that you value their time too.
Hand off meetings, not just tasks
One of the less obvious delegation moves Lia highlights is transitioning meeting ownership to a team member. Even high-profile client or stakeholder meetings can be handed off with the right setup. The process: have the team member shadow you first, then debrief together, then let them lead. Critically, coach them that they almost never have to answer a hard question on the spot. “Great question, let me take this back to the team” is a complete answer. Investing a small amount of time upfront to hand off a meeting can return hours every single week.
Examine how you work, not just what you work on
Beyond meetings, Lia pushes leaders to audit the actual steps inside their repeated tasks. Are you building decks from scratch when a template would do? Are you emailing people when a comment tag in Google Docs would be faster? Are you manually driving follow-ups that a team member could own?
The key move here is capturing your context before you delegate. The reason leaders hold onto work is often that it feels easier to do it themselves. But once a team member has your specific context, whether that is client nuances, brand language, or the reasoning behind how you approach a decision, they can do it just as well, often better, because they bring their own angle on top of yours.
Simplify and automate your team’s processes
Lia closes with the lever that has the largest long-term payoff: investing in process simplification. She describes working with a personal injury law firm that migrated to a new project management tool with built-in automations. Tasks now move automatically from one team member to the next. The owner no longer has to constantly check in to find out where something is sitting. Stress dropped for the whole team, and nothing falls through the cracks.
The question to ask is not “how do I remove people from this?” It is “where are there unnecessary handoffs, sticking points, or manual workarounds that we created for a reason that no longer exists?”
The math (and what to do with the time you get back)
Combine a regular calendar audit, tighter meetings, intentional delegation with context, and simplified processes, and Lia’s estimate is conservative: 5 to 10 hours back per week for you, 30 to 40 hours a month across the team. That is time to actually grow the business, think strategically, take a vacation without your laptop doubling as a placemat. These are not massive overhauls. Each shift is small. Done together and revisited at least quarterly, they change how leadership feels entirely.
Related episodes in this cluster
- Ep 182: Still drowning in meetings? How to reclaim 5 or more hours every week as a manager. Most managers lose hours every week because they hold on tighter when they should be letting go. Lia walks through four concrete strategies, from stepping out of meetings and delegating with context to managing your own stress signals and naming the real cut line on your priority list. This episode is most useful for managers who feel perpetually behind and are unknowingly passing that stress straight down to their teams.
- Ep 159: Why your to-do list never gets done (and how to fix it with smarter calendar design). The real reason your week feels like a hamster wheel is context switching, not a lack of effort. Lia walks through three practical calendar moves, grouping similar meetings, planning your week in advance, and color-coding by context, that dramatically cut the mental cost of jumping between tasks. This episode is especially useful for leaders who feel perpetually behind despite working hard.
- Ep 89: Why you need 1:1 meetings with every team member (and how to run them well). Yes, you need 1:1 meetings, and skipping them is quietly costing you retention, productivity, and trust. Lia walks through the Roses, Buds, Thorns framework and a highlights/lowlights structure you can run in as little as 10 minutes. This episode is especially useful for owners and leaders who feel too busy to add another standing meeting.
- Ep 76: How to optimize your meetings and save $2,000 a month. Meetings that run over are costing you roughly five hours and $2,000 every single month, and three simple shifts can fix that. Lia walks through the agenda, the parking lot, and the end-of-meeting timer as a repeatable system to end on time, every time. This episode is most useful for owners, founders, and team leads who want to reclaim time without overhauling how their team works.
Want to go deeper?
The New Manager Playbook. Lia’s bestselling guide to leading a team for the first time.
Full transcript (click to expand)
Now think about how you could be using this time to grow your business, to get people to not have to be looking at emails at night for you to take a vacation, not have to use your laptop as a place mat when you’re eating lunch. All of these things can happen when you make these little shifts. And each one of these shifts is really simple. Welcome to the Managing Made Simple podcast, where you get a masterclass in managing your team with ease in 15 minutes or less.
I’m Leah Garvin, your host and team operations consultant. Through this show and my programs with small businesses and corporate teams, I condense a decade of experience driving team operations in some of the most influential companies in tech into strategies to save you time, money, and most of all, stress. Doesn’t matter if you’re a business owner who realized that running a team isn’t as easy as you thought it would be. Are a new manager learning the ropes or a seasoned manager ready to up their game?
Everyone is welcome to hang out with Managing Made Simple. From conflicts to feedback to delegating and more, we leave no stone unturned when it comes to what makes us love managing, kind of hate it, and everything in between. Let’s go. Managing people is the hardest thing about running a business or being a team leader. I mean, of course it is, right? We’re dealing with people. And doing it well, well, that’s even harder. After hearing over and over from the leaders I was working with, just tell me what I need to do to make managing easier, I decided to create something.
Enter your Legendary Leader Action Tracker. This is a list of 10 things you can do every week to show up better for your team, get out of the weeds, and make both your and your team members’ jobs easier. Grab the tracker at leahgarvin.com slash action tracker and get ready to take a sigh of relief knowing that you don’t have to figure this out alone. Welcome back to the show. Ready to talk time management? I mean, who isn’t, right?
We all could use some better strategies around managing our time. And this topic came to mind not only because it’s something I hear about every single day, that leaders in the corporate world or business owners, founders, whoever you are, you’re struggling with really optimizing your time, making the most of it. Now, when we don’t feel like we’re managing our time as well as we could be, we know we’re leaving money on the table. If we’re a business owner, we know we’re leaving a lot of work to be left done.
If we’re a corporate leader, we know that we’re not leveraging our teams probably as best we can. So there’s a lot of problems when we feel like we’re not managing our time well, and it can create a lot of stress, pressure. Sometimes it can show our team members that we don’t really have a handle on everything. Sometimes it shows folks that we, it makes them think maybe that we don’t trust them even we do, but we just haven’t taken a step back to figure out, well, what can we hand off?
What can we delegate? Managing our time is something that is always important and is an effort that we have to be doing continually. Okay. Cause maybe we have a light few months and everything’s totally dialed in and then things get busy and we fall into our old ways of kind of manual working and getting too far in the weeds. So this kind of thing, these strategies I’m going to talk about today are things we want to revisit really on an ongoing basis, maybe monthly, maybe quarterly, but I would say at least quarterly, because you always want to sort of reset when it comes to managing your time.
Now, this topic specifically came up this week because it’s one of my favorite weeks of the year. This is where I work with one of my corporate clients. One of my clients in big tech doing focus groups. We host these every single year. We, I meet with about, I don’t know, 200 people across this team, both managers and individual contributors. And I ask the questions, what’s going well and what could be improved? And we’ve run this program about five years now.
And every year it’s really awesome to see that the things that folks like about the team, you know, we’re continuing to build on those and making things even better. And we take what could be improved. And I identify one to two key specific actions that either the managers or the leadership or individual team members can do to make the experience better. So over the years, we’ve improved the onboarding process in the team. We’ve created more opportunities for folks to connect socially and informally.
We really optimize their prioritization and decision-making process. So, and all of that specifically came out of feedback the team shared. So folks are really bought in. So anyway, I love the program because we can, we can make very specific changes that we can track over time. I also love the program because it gives me firsthand insights, both into how managers are feeling on this really large team, as well as how individual contributors and their own team members are viewing some of these issues as well.
And this year time management came up as a really prominent theme. And it wasn’t just managers saying it. Usually managers share, and I’m sure all of you are thinking this as a leader, as a manager, as a business owner. Yeah. I always feel too tight on time. I’m always spread too thin. But what was surprising about the findings in the focus groups this year was that individual team members were saying, I noticed my manager seems overwhelmed.
My manager seems spread too thin. My manager doesn’t have time to meet with me. And now I said, oh, okay, this is not just a problem. Managers are shouldering and they’re dealing with it well. They’re not dealing with it as well as they could be because now it’s starting to permeate. Everyone’s starting to notice. So this is something that we want to get a handle on. And I got to tell you, it’s really likely that if you feel like you’re barely keeping your head above water, that your team members notice it, that folks are feeling a little bit overwhelmed.
They’re feeling squeezed too. And that even though you might feel like you’re putting on a brave face or, or like you’ve got it covered, you’re that duck that’s super calm and then like kicking their legs under the surface of the water that I’m betting your team members notice. So this is something we want to get a handle on because even if they don’t notice, they will eventually, even if they don’t notice today by not creating any space with your time, you’re really preventing yourself from being able to elevate your own self, to grow the business, to, to grow the strategy, the team, to, to really, you know, think creatively, to be in your zone of genius instead of just kind of again, keeping your head above water.
I thought about, well, what are some of the things that I would suggest here besides general purpose delegating, because that’s a huge way to save time. And so I wanted to share a couple things that I don’t typically share when I talk about time management. And first and foremost is to really look across all of the little processes and how things are getting done on your team, especially in regards to your work and to stop and invest in optimizing processes.
What can you automate? What steps can remove? What can you make easier? Now I generally talk about this kind of in the workflow of a team, but I’m encouraging you to look at this for how you are working specifically. So let’s talk about some strategies for saving time. Some are reiterations of things that we talk about a lot, like expectations and delegating, but I want us to think a little bit outside the box today as well.
So I think it’s really, really useful to do a calendar audit on a regular basis. This is something I’d encourage you to do monthly, looking at all of the meetings that you’re scheduled in, looking at who’s invited, what are the agendas? Do you really need to be at all of these? And doing a purge of things that you don’t need to be at. If it’s a recurring meeting, does it have to happen weekly? Could it be biweekly?
If it’s a 60 minute meeting, could it be a 30? I encourage you to look at 30 minute meetings and say, hey, am I just using 30 because it’s the default in my calendar tool? Or could I boil this down to a 10 or 15 minute sync? So first we want to get creative with our calendar because oftentimes as leaders, most of our time is spent in meetings. In many cases, a majority of us, a lot of our time is spent in meetings.
And this is a place where we can probably carve out a little bit of time. Any meeting should have an agenda. So meeting hygiene is a big one, making sure that the right folks are there so that you can come to decisions quicker. And by doing this calendar audit and making sure you both are creating the shortest amount of time needed to solve a problem. And I don’t mean making it too short. If you need a two hour block, take a two hour block.
But for something that’s on the longer side, having really clear agendas, outcomes, really that specific cleaning up meetings, making them as high performing as possible. What I hope that you find just by doing this is you can carve out at least an hour to maybe three per week that you can start investing in other things. You may not be there today. You may actually find that you’re needing to hand off something to a team member. So that’s the next thing that doing this meeting audit can do is you can say, well, someone in my team needs to be there, or I need to set someone up to be able to lead this.
And then this allows you to start delegating some of these responsibilities. You know, maybe you have been running a meeting with a really high profile client or really senior stakeholder in your team, and that person wants you to represent the work. Handing this meeting off will take both communicating that to that stakeholder or client and to your team member to talk about, well, how can they be set up for success? First thing might be for a team member that you’re going to transition this to, to sit in with you in those meetings, to come along, to shadow you.
Then I would suggest talking about, well, how to navigate some of these challenging situations if they have hard questions or things come up that you can’t answer. A lot of times our team members are worried about taking something on because they can’t answer all the questions, but they feel like they have to answer on the spot. Well, spoiler, you never have to, rarely, I should say, not never, but you rarely have to answer something on the spot.
So we can encourage our team members to say, hey, great question. Let me take this back to the team and get back to you later today. We want to give our team members some strategies so they don’t feel like they’re on the spot. We also maybe carve out 10 minutes to prep before a meeting with them, or we do a debrief afterwards, right? So investing a little bit of time and handing off meetings and responsibilities to other folks, this is going to allow you to pull back that two, three hours a week that you can invest in something else.
That’s some of the things that I would suggest doing with meetings. Last one I mentioned briefly, shortening meetings where appropriate. Again, if you need a longer block of time, fine, but I think sometimes we’re used to having an hour meeting stay an hour because that’s the length that we had been doing it before, or a 30-minute meeting. Things like one-on-ones with our team members, we could have it at 30 and we could go through status and sort of personal updates, highlights, lowlights, or we could move things like status to either weekly status report, checking our task tracking tool, an email somewhere else, and then shortening it to 15 minutes and talking about quick wins, recognition, highlights, lowlights, and where people are stuck.
So that’s one strategy I often encourage managers and leaders that I’m working with is to really tighten up how we’re using one-on-ones to make them more impactful, especially if you have a lot of team members. I work with folks that are managing 10-plus people, directly reporting to them, and it’s very difficult to have that many one-on-ones on a weekly basis, even biweekly, so we want to tighten those up. Now, the next thing that can really help you save time is this strategy I talked about a few episodes ago on thinking through why you approach something in a certain way, okay?
And this is going to require you to start to simplify the way you’re working and actually sort of justify for yourself the time that’s going into a piece of work. Let’s say, for example, when you are working through reviews and approvals, you use a certain format and a deck and you kind of walk this process. Are there certain steps that you could sort of automate, or could you hand off a piece of that workflow? By examining the way that we’re working on a regular basis, I would say as routinely as you’re doing that calendar audit, especially for repeated tasks, we start to identify places where we’re operating slower than we have to just because it’s how we were doing that.
Maybe you use slide template instead of starting from scratch. Maybe you use a different way of tagging people into tasks. Instead of sending them an email, you’re using the commenting feature in Google Docs. Maybe you have handed off the actions and follow-ups to another team member if you had been driving that before. Thinking about both, are there steps I could remove or are there things that I could hand off even if I want to keep this main piece of work under my purview for now?
This is also going to save you time because not only are you being more intentional with how you are working, you’re also offloading things to team members. Now, when we’re offloading, especially if there are important things, important ways that we approach a task or questions we think through, or nuances, whether it’s specifics to the client, specifics to a product team, specifics to a design language, brand, whatever it looks like to how we perform a service, anything specific that’s sort of the secret sauce you bring to it, you want to communicate that context to your team member.
Because that’s when it goes from being like, it’s easier if I do it my way, or it’s better when I do it, or whatever, to that person can do it just like me, if not better. Because now they have my context and their own unique spin they bring to it. So that’s another important one we want to do is really thinking through what’s that context so that we can then delegate and set those expectations around the context.
Now the last thing is I really encourage you to invest in simplifying and optimizing processes. I don’t just say this because I love systems and process and SOPs. I love those things because the amount of time, energy, stress, and morale that you can save by making it easier to get work done, both for you and your teams, it is game-changing. Okay, we’ve all had those jobs or been in those situations where it takes millions of steps and hours and weeks to get a contract approved or a budget proposal in or a purchase order.
It’s going back and forth to get this room booking done correctly. Okay, when I was in one of the big tech companies I worked at, when you wanted to book a large conference room to plan an event or host a big meeting, there was like all these steps you had to go through and it would get kicked back and you have to fix the whole form from the beginning. Same thing when you wanted to submit a purchase order to bring a vendor on or just pay somebody or submit your own expense report after you traveled.
All of these little process things that are slow and complicated drive people bananas. And then for you to have to oversee those processes, that is taking so much time. First, it’s looking at where you have the ability to simplify. I understand if you’re working in a large corporation, some of those things you can’t simplify. The other piece of it is where have you also created some manual processes on your team, maybe as workarounds for a low performer or someone that was new and onboarding that needed a little bit more handholding.
Maybe it’s places where folks were sort of ramping onto a new thing so there was more oversight than needed. Where are things overly manual that we can make easier or remove steps from? Now, I’m not saying to hand it over to the robots and the AI and remove people from doing stuff. I’m saying, asking the question, what are the sticking points? Where are things being kicked from one person to the next where it doesn’t have to happen?
There could be fewer handoffs. How can we simplify it? This might mean you’re combining meetings or reviews, getting multiple stakeholders in the same forum. This might mean using some email automations to push one task to the next place. I’m working with a personal injury law firm that just migrated from one tool for work tracking to another. The new tool has a ton of automations built in to move one task to the next. Now, we’re still utilizing all of our same team members, but they’re going to be utilized in a better way.
It’s taking stress off their plate. It’s most of all taking stress off that business owner’s plate because she knows that no step’s being missed because that task is moving automatically from one person to the next. That’s an example of looking at, well, where were their processed breakdowns? For this law firm owner, she felt like she didn’t have a good bird’s eye view. Tasks were kind of sitting, and she didn’t know when it was being handed off to the next person.
Investing in some simplification of process and a new tool in this situation, she was able to make sure her team was really utilized at their best, and she was saving so much time constantly checking in with people. That’s an example of that. Now, doing all of these things, calendar audit and looking at how can you shorten and tighten up meetings, doing that meeting hygiene, making sure things have agendas, thinking through that context and making sure you’re delegating while also removing steps where you can, and investing in simplifying process on your team, removing manual steps, automating things where you can.
The combination of these things done on a regular basis, this is going to be saving you at least five to 10 hours a week, easily, easily across your entire team, 30, 40 hours a month. Now, think about how you could be using this time to grow your business, to get people to not have to be looking at emails at night for you to take a vacation, not have to use your laptop as a placemat when you’re eating lunch.
All of these things can happen when you make these little shifts. Each one of these shifts is really simple. That’s what we’re all about. The show is giving you simple strategies to make managing easier because it doesn’t have to feel so hard. It doesn’t have to feel like you can’t come up for air. Because I’ll tell you, the saddest thing that I heard in those focus groups this week was folks feeling like their manager is overwhelmed and they need help.
The manager is supposed to be that foundation, that rock, that person that’s got it figured out. When our team members are feeling like, I hope you’re okay, now we really have to be intentional. So try these strategies. Think about how can you make things easier across your team. And you are going to save so much time, so much money, and so much stress. Both you and your team members will be happier. Trust me. See you next time.
That’s all I have for today. Thank you so much for tuning in to the Managing Made Simple podcast, where my goal is to demystify the job of people management so that together we can make the workplace somewhere everyone can thrive. With that said, let’s spread the word. If you love this episode, please pass it along to someone who might benefit from it. See you next time.
Questions this episode answers
How can I save 5 to 10 hours a week as a team leader without burning out my team?
Start with a monthly calendar audit. Look at every meeting you are in, cut the ones you do not need to attend, shorten the ones that run too long, and make sure every meeting has a clear agenda. Then examine your repeated tasks and remove unnecessary steps or hand them off to team members with the right context. Finally, invest in simplifying your team's processes by reducing manual handoffs and automating where you can. Done consistently, these three moves combined can save you five to ten hours a week and your whole team thirty to forty hours a month.
How do I know if my overwhelm as a leader is affecting my team?
Your team members are watching more closely than you think. In focus groups Lia ran with a large tech team, individual contributors reported noticing that their manager seemed overwhelmed and spread too thin, and some even worried their manager did not have time for them. So even if you feel like you are holding it together on the surface, the stress tends to show. If you feel like you are barely keeping your head above water, it is very likely your team already notices, and that affects how safe and supported they feel at work.
How do I hand off a meeting or responsibility to a team member without things falling apart?
Start by having your team member shadow you in the meeting a few times before taking it over. Then walk them through how to handle hard questions. The key thing to tell them is that they almost never have to answer on the spot. They can say, great question, let me get back to you, and follow up later. You can also carve out ten minutes to prep together before the meeting and debrief afterward. Sharing that context, the nuances, the client specifics, the way you approach the work, is what turns a handoff from shaky to solid.
What is a calendar audit and how often should I do one as a leader?
A calendar audit is a regular review of every meeting on your schedule. You look at who is invited, whether there is an agenda, and whether you actually need to be there. Lia recommends doing this monthly. Ask whether a recurring weekly meeting could go biweekly, whether a sixty minute meeting could be thirty, and whether a thirty minute meeting could be ten or fifteen. Most leaders spend a large chunk of their week in meetings, so even small cuts here can realistically open up one to three hours a week you can redirect toward higher-value work.
How can simplifying team processes save me time as a business owner?
Overly manual processes, where tasks sit waiting, bounce between people unnecessarily, or require constant check-ins, eat up a huge amount of a leader's time. Lia worked with a law firm owner who switched to a project tracking tool with built-in automations that moved tasks from one team member to the next automatically. The owner stopped spending time chasing status updates and gained a clear bird's eye view of the work. The goal is not to replace people but to remove the friction so your team can do their best work and you can stop being the one holding everything together manually.