(The following is an excerpt from my book: The I.T. Leader’s First Days, a book to give a jump start to new IT leaders.)

As you enter leadership, you enter a world where you are primarily responsible for identifying and prioritizing your day-to-day task list. You won’t be working on a project list. You won’t be working from an agile sprint board. You won’t be working on the list of help desk tickets. You will set most of your tasks, not someone else.

These tasks will be large and small. Some will depend others and some will be only you. Some will be out in the organization and some will be with your team. Some will repeat and some will be unique. 

You will need to maintain a sense of priority among things that are very short term (return a phone call) or very long term (set strategy for all IT systems). 

Managing this wildly varying list is hard. Simple time management techniques struggle with the variety. It is also a very personal thing. Everyone has to find their own technique. 

Your task management technique will change over time. Constantly improving it will pay big dividends.