Prioritising effectively and getting work done as managers

New tech leads often feel swamped by endless meetings and tiny tasks, losing the sense of progress they had as individual contributors. The core shift is to view work through the lens of the team's impact rather than personal output. By recognizing that responsibility does not equal execution, leaders can free mental bandwidth for strategic work.

A practical tool the article recommends is a 2×2 delegation matrix that plots competence of the report against the manager's competence. Tasks that both manager and report can handle land in quadrants 1 and 3 and should be delegated, while only the manager should own quadrants 2 and 4. The example of reviewing a design document shows how delegating to a capable report prevents the leader from getting stuck in low-value work.

Beyond delegation, the piece layers urgent-important prioritization. Urgent-important tasks-incidents, onboarding, unblocking-must be done now. Important-but-not-urgent work like setting team strategy should be scheduled. Urgent-but-not-important items are prime delegation candidates. This dual framework gives leaders a clear daily decision-making process.

The takeaway is simple: being responsible is not the same as doing everything yourself. Use a delegation matrix to shift work to capable team members, then apply urgent-important triage to keep focus on what truly moves the team forward, reducing overload and protecting morale.