205 – My Top Time Management Tips for Overwhelmed Volunteer Managers

March 12, 2026

Episode #205: My Top Time Management Tips for Overwhelmed Volunteer Managers

Managing volunteers often means juggling a wide range of responsibilities. From responding to emails and coordinating schedules to planning events and maintaining relationships, volunteer leaders frequently feel pulled in many directions at once. 

In this episode, Tobi Johnson shares practical strategies to help volunteer managers regain focus and reduce the sense of constant overwhelm. Drawing from her own nonprofit experience, she explains why the common pressure to “do more with less” can make work harder rather than more productive. 

Tobi walks through several simple but powerful approaches to managing your time more intentionally, including setting clear priorities, protecting time for focused work, and reducing the impact of constant interruptions and task switching. 

You’ll also hear why delegating outcomes instead of tasks, building stronger systems, and protecting your personal energy are essential for sustainable leadership. 

If you often feel like your to-do list never ends, this episode offers practical ideas to help you work more strategically, focus on what matters most, and create a more manageable rhythm in your volunteer leadership work. 

Time Management Tips – Episode Highlights 

• [00:27] – Overwhelm Is Real 
• [02:04] – Do Less With Less 
• [05:11] – Set Clear Goals 
• [10:10] – Prioritize By Goals 
• [12:31] – Deep Work And Batching 
• [20:49] – Quick Break And Newsletter 
• [21:54] – Delegate Outcomes Not Tasks 
• [26:52] – Build Margin Protect Energy 
• [31:11] – Rest As Leadership Skill 
• [35:11] – Rapid Fire Bonus Tips 

Time Management Tips – Quotes from the Episode 

“There’s a difference between being busy and being panicked all the time.” – Tobi Johnson

“Time management tips aren’t about squeezing more things into your calendar.” – Tobi Johnson

Helpful Links

• VolunteerPro Blog – Pro Roundup: A Month of Love with Free Nonprofit Tools, Downloads, and Templates  
• Volunteer Nation Episode #185: To Burnout & Back – My Secret Struggle with Long COVID 
• Volunteer Nation Episode #023: Secrets to Managing Time and Energy  
• Volunteer Nation Episode 046 – Save Time with Better Volunteer Management Systems  

Contact Us

Have questions or suggestions for the show? Email us at wecare@volpro.net.

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Episode #205 Transcript: My Top Time Management Tips for Overwhelmed Volunteer Managers

Tobi: Today I want to talk about time saving tips for overwhelmed volunteer managers. If you’re like me when I worked in nonprofits, you have so little time and so many things to do. You’re wearing so many hats; you’re juggling so many.

Tasks, but also interfacing with people and trying to maintain good relationships with your volunteers, with your coworkers, with leadership, et cetera. Your email rules your day. You’ve got reports to do. You’ve got events to plan. You’ve got data to crunch; you’ve got meetings to go to. I mean, it’s. A lot, right?

And I want to talk to you today about some ways you can save some time but create a little more calm in your life. Believe me now, I’ve used many, in fact, all the things I’m going to talk about today, and they have made my life bitter because I too am a busy person, but that doesn’t mean that I must be frantic.

There’s a difference between being busy and being panicked all the time, and our nervous systems just can’t handle being panicked all the time. And so, I want to talk about this. I want to talk about being strategic, not hustle based, being focused on impact, not busyness. And this episode is specifically designed for people who work with volunteers because not only are you running programs, but you’re also working with many volunteers, and they need your time and attention too.

So, let’s start with what I want to talk about first, which is a mindset shift, and that is that. There is a fallacy around do more with less. I know in nonprofits now, we have really struggled in the last year or two with funding cuts, with shifts in the way people are giving, and it has led to.

Organizations having to do more or less now. It’s always been that way in our sector. I worked in the sector for 25 years. We were always doing more with less, but were we really doing more with less? And that’s what I want to talk about before we get into our time management tips. As budgets get tight, we’re often.

Asked to do more with less, but again, are we really doing more with less? Because we can’t really clone ourselves. The only ways to do more with less are to work more hours, so work longer days and weekends. Or to get better at how we’re managing our time and how we’re focusing. And it doesn’t necessarily mean just being more productive in terms of doing more in the hours that we have at work, but also perhaps being more.

Smart about the projects that we choose in the first place to spend our time and tension, but the problem isn’t your time management. It’s too many priorities competing for limited. Energy. This simply isn’t sustainable. And we’re going to talk a little bit more about how too many things on your plate and multitasking having makes you less productive.

Instead of doing more with less, let’s do more. Let’s do less with less. Less things on our plate. The right things that make the most difference. That’s what I want to do. Do less with less. Now, doing less with less doesn’t mean that we are not getting important things done. It doesn’t mean we’re not moving our mission forward.

But the more we heap on our plate with the fallacy that we are somehow superhuman and could do more with less is something that’s going to shoot us in the foot. It’s really not going to help us move forward. I know this isn’t easy. Deciding priorities, for example, is hard sometimes because sometimes we like to hide behind the busy work.

I’ve done this before, and the work that challenges us to get outside of our comfort zone. And so sometimes what we’re trying to do when we’re doing more with less is we add on little projects or we focus our energy on the small things that aren’t really moving the needle. And we do that because those are the places that we’re most comfortable in.

So, let’s start getting into this. I’ve got some very clear strategies for you. When you walk away from this episode. You are going to guaranteed have some strategies you can. Take steps with right away. So, let’s talk about strategy number one. Set crystal clear goals. Vague goals really create scattered work and overwhelm because you’re just not sure what you should be spending your time on.

When you have a long to-do list, you’re just checking things off your to-do list. And at some point, when you’re not clear about your goals, your inbox in your email rules your day. And it shouldn’t be like that because we have our own priorities to work on. Email is just a communication device or a tool.

It’s not there to tell us what’s the most important thing to be working on. When you think about your goals, I want you to think about choosing one to two major goals per quarter. One to two major goals per quarter. They should have already been named in your annual strategy plan for volunteer involvement, but if not, go with what you know, think right now about what the one to two goals are, the big ones that you need to work on this quarter in this 90 day sprint.

We work on this during our Volunteer Vision Week. Strategic planning bootcamp every fall. If you’ve been a vision seeker with us, go ahead and re just, if you haven’t looked at your strategic plan that you developed last fall, look at it now. Instead of, let me talk about what Crystal, what these crystal-clear goals look like too.

Instead of, the goal is we need to recruit more volunteers. That’s not clear, is it? It doesn’t tell us how many, it doesn’t tell us what skills. It doesn’t tell us when we need them by. It doesn’t tell us what training they need to be participating in or what tools they need there. There’s not much there.

Instead, try something like that. This, I’ve got some clear goals for you. We need 20 bilingual mentors by April 30. That’s a clear goal. We want to increase volunteer retention from 65% to 75%. That’s a clear goal. We aim to increase volunteer donors by 15% this year. We want volunteers to contribute 8,000 hours each annually.

Or I don’t think that’s each. I think it’s on average that we want all our volunteers. 8,000 hours. Can you imagine that there would be one super volunteer contributing 8,000 hours? My goodness. No, that’s doing more with less. No, 8,000 overall. Sorry about that. Your clear metrics that you might track to, to see if you’re on track with these goals might be your retention rate, your recruitment targets by role, your volunteer satisfaction scores, your total hours contributed on.

It could be on average per volunteer. It could be aggregate like that 8,000 or volunteer to, to donor conversion. That could be another metric. Clear goals, make your prioritization obvious. And what this does to reduce overwhelm is it helps you start to think about, I don’t need to worry. I don’t need to feel guilty that I’m not working on these other projects.

I can feel confident that I’m making the right choice. Now, I’ve seen this in my own life, especially this year because my strategic plan is. Like so on point this year, I mean, every year I develop a strategic plan, but this year I spend a lot of time and energy because I’m bringing on team members. This year I’m doing more, not with less, but I’m doing different things, and it needs to be really clear what steps we’re taking and what we’re tracking.

I have five main goals and it is very clear to me what I should be working on and what I have to let go of. And sometimes it means letting go of things and the guilt is gone because I know you know what that that particular project is a really nice to have. It would be great if we had done that, but it is not one of my primary five goals this year, so I’ve got to put it on the back burner.

Now, one other thing with your one to two goals, you want to get your supervisors. Buy in for your one to two priority goals this quarter. Ask for agreement. Ask, clarify with them what you think is not a priority so that you are able to set boundaries when others come to you with their priorities. And you can say, hey, that’s important, but it’s not aligned with our top volunteer retention goals this quarter.

Our recruitment goals, we have two main goals this quarter. This is what they are, and unfortunately that’s going to have to be pushed to next quarter or later in the year. And when you and your supervisor are completely aligned on what these goals are, they can give you cover when other people come asking you to do other things, and you have to gently.

But confidently say, well, I’m sorry, but that’s not my goal for this quarter. All right. Strategy number two, prioritize your tasks by those goals. And I said a little bit about that. Forget the rest. I just talked about that once your goals are set. Every task that you’re taking on almost now, there’s a few general administrative always happening.

Every green evergreen type of tasks that you participate in daily or weekly, but every other task, those are little, I call those little pebbles, but the big rocks. Are things, those big goals and the tasks related to those goals. So the tasks you are choosing to prioritize, connect directly to those one to two big goals.

Ask yourself every time someone assigns you something or wants to assign you something, does this directly affect. My top, top one to two goals, or is it just noise and a bright and shiny object that someone else says is important. Now, I know this is hard in a nonprofit, highly collaborative environment, but I can guarantee you that once you start working in this way, people will start to understand and you can start and you can communicate at the beginning of the quarter.

Hey, these are our two top two goals. Now, if something isn’t aligned with your goals, it doesn’t necessarily mean that it doesn’t get done. You can defer to a later time. You can minimize the project, or you can simply say, no, I’m sorry, that’s not on our roadmap. I can certainly put it on my parking lot and consider it next year in our strategic plan.

So this is one of the most practical time management tips. Stop giving equal weight. Two unequal tasks. Okay, stop giving unequal weight to unequal tasks because, or equal weight, I should say, to unequal tasks. Because some of your tasks that people are giving you, they’re, they just don’t have equal weight.

They’re not aligning with your goals. Now, I’m assuming that you’re choosing goals that are actually going to move the needle in your program. They’re usually around volunteer recruitment, volunteer retention, volunteer status. Faction, some type of process improvement, some type, uh, sometimes it’s technology onboarding.

There are things that can really move the needle, so we’ve got to make sure we’re staying focused now. Sta strategy number three, plan for deep work and batching. Plan for deep work and batching. Now, what I mean by deep work is uninterrupted work, work that your brain can really dive into where you’re focused and in your flow.

You want to set aside time to work on your goals without interruption. I call this work on your program versus in your program. In your program you are. You’re responding and you’re being very reactive, but on your program, you’re being proactive. You’re thinking, you’re doing program development, and as if you’re a volunteer manager or a leader of volunteers or responsible for setting the sort of direction of volunteer engagement in your organization, you need time for that.

It doesn’t just happen. You need time for that. So, here’s the thing about deep work, why it’s so important. Research on task switching is super clear. It’s not debatable. It’s been researched. Switching between tasks is cognitively expensive. That means you lose time even when the task is small. Even stopping to check your phone and then going back.

Maybe there’s a text that came in and going back to another task. It has a negative effect. It’s not just the time you spend doing it. The switch costs, they call it the switch cost. Is real Researchers like Sophie Laroi described something like attention residue when part of your brain stays stuck on the previous task after you’ve moved on.

So, this means that your brain is now splitting its energy between two tasks, even though you’re trying to stay focused on one and you think you’re back. So, you’re not fully focused, you’re working slower, and you make more mistakes. So, interruptions and not having time for deep work have some, there are real costs to this in practical terms.

Even a small email interruption during a planning block can reduce performance on your next task. And so think about that. Think about that it. Second thing about this is to know is that it takes time to refocus. So not only are you splitting your focus and you’re making mistakes, but you’re also, it take, there’s time lost.

So research from the American Psychological Association summarized cognitive studies that show that even brief mental blocks from switching tasks, when we go from one task to another, it can cost up to 40%. Now, let’s say this 40% of your productivity. 40%. That’s a lot of time lost switching tasks. Other workplace research, university of California Irvine, for example, found that after an interruption, it takes an average of 23 minutes and 15 seconds.

They got real, real accurate. There are 23 minutes of 15 seconds to fully return to the original task. Imagine that 23 minutes to fully return for your brain to fully focus back on the big tasks you’re working on. Now, it doesn’t mean that every interruption costs 23 minutes of staring at the wall.

You’re not just kind of like when you switch, you’re not just like dead in the water, but it does mean you rarely return to the same cognitive depth. Complex thinking is what suffers most, and for volunteer managers and those who lead in organizations that are doing strategic planning. Onboarding design data analysis, if they’re working on volunteer survey design, if they’re doing instructional design, if they’re planning out goals and strategies, whatever it is, marketing, messaging, any of the things that we all do, this matters a lot because this brain energy, we need it to do that work well.

The other thing to know is that I found it interesting when I first learned multitasking. First, it’s a myth that most people, there’s a very small percentage of people around the world who can attend to their brain, can attend to two tasks at once.

It’s very minute the number of people who have that skill, but the rest of us multitasking actually decreases. Productivity. And so when we multitask, which we think we’re multitasking, but we’re really quickly task switching is we perform worse on memory and task switching tasks. We are more easily distracted, and we struggle to filter irrelevant information.

And people who multitask don’t get better at task switching. They get worse at focusing and so for them, there’s working on your program and there’s working in your program, and each of these. Could be something you do block out time for. So for example, working in your program, answering emails, solving, scheduling issues, handling last-minute cancellations, responding to last minute requests for things.

That’s all stuff that’s super reactive, right? You can block time in your day to do that. And okay, these are the times that I do that. So if you have a last minute request, you need to ask it of me this time in the day. If I’m going to look at email, I’m looking at email during this block and this block.

These are the only blocks I’m looking at email. So you can, even when you’re working on your program in a reactive way, make it more pro proactive by batching time now. Working on your program, the more proactive work, like improving your onboarding, designing retention strategies, creating systems, analyzing data, doing all that good stuff, you also absolutely 110% need to have blocked time for that.

You need hours of uninterrupted time. Both working in your program and on your program are important, but if you’re proactive with both and you set aside bigger blocks of time for your design work, this will reduce your feelings of chaos and improve that your brain work. You’ll be smarter when you’re making these decisions.

So schedule 60 to 90 minutes of uninterrupted focus, if that’s all you can set aside for some of these tasks. If you’re developing some email copy, for example, maybe it’s a volunteer welcome sequence of emails that’s going to take you several hours. You know it’s going to take a few hours to get that done and you don’t want to put it down and then go away and walk back.

If you can get a three hour block on your calendar, great. No email, no slack, no meetings. Nobody pinging you, nobody knocking on your door. Nobody coming in and stepping into your cubicle. Train people that you are on a productivity challenge for yourself, and you need them to respect your boundaries. Task switching.

Cost. Mental energy, every interruption resets your brain, and you can lose up to 25 minutes getting refocused. Who has time for that? We don’t. So, it might be a fun conversation to have in your next team meeting. Ask folks, hey, is this working for us the way we’re interrupting each other? Or can we do this in a better way so that we all do better work, we feel less chaotic, and we’re smarter when we’re doing our work?

That’s what we want to do. So. Schedule. There’s lots of things you can do to take you to batch. You can schedule interviews with volunteers back-to-back. You can batch recognition, email writing. You can set volunteer office hours. You can set aside for copywriting. You can, there’s all kinds of things, and you can actually set these out and carve them out on your calendar.

So these time management tips are about reducing your cognitive load and reclaiming your hours each week. So I’ve got a few more strategies for you as well. Let’s take a pause for a quick break from my top time management tips for overwhelm volunteer managers. We will be right back. Hey everybody. Have you subscribed to our Pro News Weekly resource email yet?

If not, why not? Each week you get a helpful article, a research insight, our latest podcast episode, and one practical tip you can use right away. Plus, when you subscribe. I’ll send you a few helpful resources via email to take action and get some wins right away. So join 9,500 other leaders just like you who are upgrading their practices and making an even bigger impact.

Visit val pro.net/newsletter subscription. That’s vol pro.net/newsletter-subscription, and I hope to see you on the inside. Okay, we’re back with my top time management tips for overwhelm volunteer managers. I want to get to strategy number four. Strategy number four is really about delegating outcomes, not tasks.

Now, before the break, we talked about why multitasking doesn’t help, it actually hurts your productivity. Talked about the importance of setting goals, the importance of. Defining and prioritizing which goals we’re working on, and we talked about. Batching and really doing our deep work, being very purposeful about what we’re working on.

Also, I want to talk about when we talked about choosing and sometimes either delegating or deferring a task because it’s not one of our top goals. I want to talk about when you delegate how to make it less stressful for you. And more productive. So, strategy number four is to delegate outcomes, not tasks to delegate.

Outcomes not tasks. Then, I’ll just do it myself because it’s faster mentality. Is a, another fallacy if you think about it. If it’s a repetitive task, just. Estimate in a in one, in a single year, how many times are you going to do that task over and over again, and then figure out how much time will it take you to train someone to do that task and to coach them for, let’s just say a month to help them get good at it, and so that they’re confident?

You’re confident, it’s all good. I can assure you that it’s much less time to train and coach somebody than it is to do that repetitive task for the next year. So, it’s a fallacy that it’s, if you do it yourself, it’ll be faster. It’s also such a path to burnout when we try to take it all on. Instead, you want to assign both responsibility and authority.

To take on a task. You want to create volunteer leaders who are confident and can get the work done. You want to empower team captains. You want to build, for example, onboarding buddies and welcome teams and data analytics. I just worked with an Impact lab member and their team this past year who HA did a conducted A DIY audit.

Of their volunteer program and the volunteer manager, all she did was choose the people on the team. She did nothing else. And she connected me with them so I could do a q and a with them so they could pick by brain, because we have a toolkit for DIY volunteer audits that are led by volunteers, insider Impact Lab.

And so, they were using that toolkit, and they had a few questions for me. So, I got to meet the awesome volunteers who were auditing the volunteer program, and I just saw the report last week and it was. Fantastic. And so, I know that we can trust volunteers with these things if we are delegating property or properly.

You’re not just saving time; you’re building leadership capacity when you’re delegating. So, one of my most sustainable time management tips is to build systems and people. So, everything doesn’t depend on you. So when you’re delegating, make sure you have your system written down so people can follow it, whether it’s a standard operating procedure or SOP.

It’s a checklist, it’s a flow chart. Whatever it is, it’s a desk manual. Those are things I recommend as well. So, here’s what we do at Volunteer Pro to make sure we can delegate with confidence. First up, we set our annual strategic goals. Second, we build standard systems, and we are in the midst of documenting that we are just about to complete the documentation of a lot of our SOPs.

Not all of them, but many of them. Then we train our team on these SOPs on these. Standard ways we do this business, we set up tracking systems, so, and meetings so we can check in about how things are going. And we meet regularly to review those progress goals. So, for example, one of our big goals is improving and expanding our email subscribers.

We have a lot of people on our list, about 10,000. We have a lot of people who follow us. It’s fantastic, but we want to grow it even further. We want to reach more people. And so, what. I’m doing is delegating this outcome to my new marketing team member, my new marketing team member, and then I will coach, we will track every week how many new email subscribers have we gained and then give coaching.

What ways can we improve this and what have we already done to improve it and how? How much are those things helping? So we’re really focused on the outcomes, so we’re delegating the outcomes. We are, we do have specific systems for some of the things we do. Like we send out our newsletter, for example.

But we’re also giving people space to be creative themselves as well, and that means you’re spending less time micromanaging. Strategy number five is building in margin and protecting your energy. Now, if you are a regular listener of the podcast, you remember my story about long COVID. I struggled with long COVID.

It was Volunteer Nation episode 180 5. I’m looking at it right here to burn out and back. My secret struggle with long COVID and I talked about how long COVID just took me out and how I really had to focus on my health a lot more than I had been to get myself back to a place where I could live without so much.

Exhaustion and side effects. There’s so many side effects with long COVID, and so those of you who have struggled with burnout or struggled with chronic diseases have to take care of yourself, and so we’ve got to build in margin to protect our energy. Our energy is our greatest asset. You might also want to check out Volunteer Nation episode 23, where I talk about secrets to managing time and energy.

It’s a good one, and I will talk about some of the things I’ve talked about today and then some. And then Volunteer Nation, episode 46, where I talk about systems. So, saving time with better volunteer management systems. And we’ll link to all of these in the show notes. So, let’s go back to get back to building margin and protecting energy.

Overwhelm often comes from zero buffer time and recovery time. Now, I’m not talking about the buffer time between multitasking. That’s not what I’m talking about. What I’m talking about is actual rest for your brain. You need to think about are you giving yourself buffer time? So leave 20% of your calendar with white space.

I schedule a lot out on my calendar, not only my meetings, but also when I’m going to get certain tasks done. But you also need about 20% of white space to give yourself a time to take a break to. To get a breather, to have lunch, to do all of those things, assume tasks also take 30% longer than expected. Now I am, I have to say I, I am.

I will raise my left hand and my right hand and say that, you know what? I always underestimate how long something’s going to take. Ah. Always do. I know it’s, I know it’s what, who I am and what I do. And so I try to not take on so much. ’cause I know things are going to take longer, but I also think you should reflect on how long things have taken so you know how long it’s going to take next time.

So I do know the. Average time it takes me to develop a volunteer pro impact lab training for a seminar with slides and with a handout, et cetera. I know how long it takes me about to do one of those, so I can book that time and block it out on my calendar. Avoid booking back-to-back meetings. If you can give yourself some time for your brain to rest.

Now, I know that’s not always possible, but see if you can build in some wiggle room. Those are some ways to build margin. Now, building energy and managing your energy, your sharpest hours, whatever they are times for strategy planning, decision making, and the hours where you’re a little fatigued. Those are for the things that really don’t take that much brain space.

And so I am a morning person, and so when I need to do something really important, I try to do it in the morning time because by the end of the day, I’m pretty tired. I’ve expended all my energy by the end of the day, and so I really do need to do my most important things in the morning, but. Your most important time isn’t for inbox triage.

Don’t allow other people to set your daily agenda for you unless you report directly to them. And even then, who wants to be micromanaged? Really? So sometimes the best. Move is not to check your email. First thing, it’s to start doing the thing. Either the thing you’ve been putting off or the thing that takes your most cognitive, most of your cognitive load.

You need a lot of focus for it, and then you can jump into your email later. I know it’s a habit for many of us to get on and look at our email first, but is it the most productive? Maybe not. And maybe it starts to distract you already from that primary goal you had or that primary task you had for that day.

Now, strategy number six. Rest. Is a productivity tool and a leadership skill. I’m always talking about these leadership skills that people don’t think are leadership skill. Like I say this, inside our Impact lab community all the time to our members, sharing your wins and celebrating progress small and large is a leadership skill.

It’s something you need to model. To other people. Rest and recovery is also a leadership skill. It’s something many of us have to learn, especially if we’re type A and we’re hard workers. We, we grew up in a family of people who hard work was valued, but. You can run yourself into the ground, and so it is, rest is a productivity tool and it’s a leadership skill.

For example, yesterday, for whatever reason, I didn’t get enough sleep the night before and for a couple nights I’ve not had good sleep, and so I was very tired by the afternoon. And so I just stopped working early, a little bit earlier than usual. And my husband came home from work. He said, what are you doing?

And I was laying on the couch watching tv and he said, what are you doing? Are you okay? And I said, I’m really tired. And I said, I just need to rest. I just need to rest. And guess what? I rested. I got a good night’s sleep last night, and look at me. I’m on point today. So I have learned over the years that we shouldn’t be guilty when our body gives us clues that says it’s time to rest.

Now, when we’re in the work world and we’re in at the brick and mortar building and we’re not working at home, sometimes it’s hard to do that. At the very least, just take a walk outside if you can get some fresh air and it’ll help perk you up. So chronic overwork. Reduces decision quality, increases mistakes, damages, creativity, leads to burnout.

Chronic overwork, rest improves your strategic thinking. It improves your emotional regulation and improves your leadership presence. It improves your leadership presence. So rest is a leadership skill. Let’s not be guilty about taking rest so that we can be. As powerful as we can as leaders because as we lead volunteers, it is not an easy job and it’s something that we have to really have the energy for.

I would say also exercise. Any kind of mobility work you’re doing in terms of stretching, yoga, meditation, all those other wellness activities are also part of that rest and recovery prescription. I’ll say that works best for you. You choose the combo that works best for you. So one of the most overlooked time management tips, you are not a machine.

Recovery is part of your performance. If you talk to any elite athlete, they take time for recovery. They sit in an ice bath, for example. They take, they pay attention to nutrition of course, but they also pay attention to their recovery. And so it’s okay to push for deadlines. Specific deadlines from time to put in a big push, but not all of the time.

Your nervous system cannot handle that amount of adrenaline all the time, and it you get maxed out and it becomes harder and harder to recover. Believe me, having gone through long COVID for. More than one year. It took me two to three years to recover from long COVID. It was hard, and I had to learn the new way of being so nobody’s workplace, and my workplace didn’t give me long COVID.

It didn’t make me sick. But this is important. Your workplace should not make you sick. It should not make you burned out ever. That is not the function of work in our lives is to make us sick. And so we really need to be strict, structured about our boundaries and taking our time. And finally, I just want to end with some rapid fires, just some really quick rapid fire bonus time management tips.

So here we go. I’m going to get, I’m going to read ’em off. I got to look at my notes here. One, create email templates for frequent questions, frequently asked questions that you want to respond to. Create an email template, use vol, a volunteer FAQ list to reduce. Repeat responses. So put it on a webpage and give it to give volunteers a place to go to get their answers.

Keep a not now or parking lot list for ideas. If you’re like me, you come up with a bazillion ideas every week. Oh, that’s a great idea. We should do that. You know what? Those of us that are highly creative, we have got to have a place to put that stuff so it gets out of our brain onto paper. You can even put a flip chart in your office if you want, or just keep it inside your date book.

And yes, some of us have hard copy date books. I do digital and hard copy, or if you have a notes on your phone, put it there. Whatever place is best for you to keep track of these things. Conduct a quarterly stop, start and continue doing audit as part of your quarterly planning. We do this every month, every quarter, I should say, at the end of the quarter for the coming quarter.

Inside the Impact Lab, we do this. As part of our planning, we, we start with quick wins and celebrating, but we also do stop, start and continue doing. So we reflect on maybe some habits that we want to stop doing that aren’t good for us, or things we want to start doing, things we want to delegate to others, those kinds of things.

And then limit your email, checking to two to three blocks per day. Set aside those blocks and forget about your email. The rest of the time, if you are checking your email nonstop, productivity’s probably down by 50% and you just can’t afford it. You can’t afford it. There’s nothing that important there.

Of course, there’s things you’ve got to read, but it’s not that you’re not, it doesn’t have to be read every five minutes. Okay. In closing, just remember that the Do More with Less is a fallacy. That you should set crystal clear goals that you should prioritize based on those goals. Get supervisor, buy-in on your goals.

Schedule your deep work. Delegate for outcomes. Don’t micromanage. Build margin and time for rest and recovery, and. Be strategic. My final encouragement to you is that time management tips aren’t about squeezing more things into your calendar. Rather, it’s all about being strategic with the time you have, doing it with total focus and making sure it’s moving the needle in your program and leave the rest behind.

All right, so those are my time management tips. I hope they’ve been helpful to you. If you like this, I hope to share it with a friend, and if you would, if you’re watching or seeing a clip of this on social media, if you post in the chat below the word news. We will sign you up for our Pro News Weekly Pro News newsletter.

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All right everybody, so take care. I hope you’ll see me next week, at the same time, same place. This is the volunteer nation. Take care everybody.