This article focuses on how time is used, actively and creatively, as a resource to produce categories in school leaders' narratives about their school leadership. 'Time' is used in the construction of categories, for example 'new teachers', 'old fogeys' and 'traditional school pincipals', as a discursive and rhetorical resource or as a method to create intelligible and rhetorically effective linguistic actions in interaction with an interviewer. The study is part of the research project Educational management as discourse and discursive practice - the leading words, financed by the Swedish Research Council (Vetenskapsrådet), Sweden. The head of the project is Professor Gunnar Sundgren, Mälardalens Högskola (Mälardalen University). The project has explored varying school management discursive arenas, focusing on how meaning is negotiated and how people at different levels in educational organisations interact verbally. The study presented here is based upon empirical material from three different interviews carried out by the author with assistant upper secondary principals in charge of the Swedish gymnasium, a three year school option after the nine-year compulsory school. The students in upper secondary school are aged between sixteen and twenty. The theoretical premises of this approach build on an inter- disciplinary research area that has for the last twenty years considered the world as constructed by, and within, face-to-face interactions. The area comprises sociologists, linguists, social psychologists, communication scholars, anthropologists although with various research interests and methodolocigal approaches. Talk is considered as social action , and people achieve identities, realities, social order and social relationships through talk. Interviewing is understood as an inter-actional event, and both interviewer and respondent are involved in the generation of versions of social reality built around categories and activities. Categorization after all, is something people do routinely in talk. If we talk about anything, rather than make grunts or gestures, we can be sure that we will be using categories, and thereby making categorizations. Analysis of the interviews carried out for this study shows that the assistant principals, in their own narratives about their work, use time as a resource in the construction of categories. These constructions include terms that can be directly translated as "old" and "new" teachers, "old fogeys", "old secondary grammar school, 'the old traditional principal', 'the one who has the right perspective', and 'the classical head and employee'. These categories are actively used to construct the school leader's identity as innovative, creative, and belonging to an improving school leader with new perspective. Participants in the interview then, use time for practical and locally motivated purposes and in order to create intelligible and effective rhetorical actions in the interaction. In sum, the use of 'time' and time-related categories are important resources in categorization and in the construction of the interviewee as a credible school leader.