Transcription
This is what my schedule looks like as the CEO of a multi-million dollar company. When I first started, it was hectic. Then I had human alarm clocks: I had my first son, Max, and then Noah. All of a sudden, I couldn't stay up until 2:00 in the morning to get caught up.
What I want to share with you is how I've designed my life and my calendar to be the most effective CEO for the people that report to me.
The first thing is, even though I have a morning routine that ramps up my body and mind so that I can focus, it's really about getting the big rocks moving forward. Your first 90 minutes of your day, at a minimum, should be focused on your number one priority—the one thing, the leading domino. If you get that done, everything else in your life will get easier. Typically, it's stuff around fundraising, business development, sales, marketing—whatever area of your business has a blockage right now. You should wake up and pack it violently for 90 minutes every day.
But my morning is really left pretty much until noon for my creative work and output. What I don't do is sit there on my phone and start getting into my inbox or looking at my WhatsApp. I get up, I execute. It's planned the night before; I know exactly what I need to do to move the business forward. I don't get distracted by a bunch of demands on my time.
The second aspect about my calendar, if you looked at it, is that I don't have white space. I don't have 15 minutes here or 30 minutes there; everything is allocated. My assistant and I will sit down the week before, look at the calendar, and if there is a 90-minute block, a 30-minute window, or 15 minutes in between meetings, we're always looking to fill it.
I have different types of meetings that I'll do. A 15-minute meeting is great for a first-time new connection where I don't even know if this is somebody I have an opportunity to do any work with, but I want to take the meeting. Usually, it's a quick 15 minutes.
Thirty minutes are used for business partners, leaders that report to me, and people I want to invest in or coach. We use those 30 minutes for that purpose. Anything above that, I'm always asking myself what projects could I accelerate if I allocated that open time to a project that's on the next 90-minute window of key boulders and rocks I need to push up the mountain.
So, I don't do bleed time. A lot of people just allow themselves to have that space to recover and do email. I block my email time, I block my social media time, and my personal time—date nights, spending time with my kids—it's all in there. From the time I wake up at 4:00 in the morning until I pass out at 9:00 at night, it is allocated.
I never wonder if I'm getting behind on different parts of my life because my whole life is designed into the day and the week. If you looked at my calendar, you would see that my day is designed for energy. There's a reason why I do certain workouts in the morning, then I do my creative work, and then I usually have some kind of reset for lunch.
I get into meetings, calls, collaborations, and external meetings. If I have to go look at projects or deals, I usually like to wind down before dinner with my kids because I want to make sure that I close any open loops so I can be focused for the meal.
Usually, every night, it's either going mountain biking with friends, spending time with my wife, or having a date night. We do group date nights; we'll go wake surfing. Essentially, I use the day and my natural internal feeling to show up and do the type of work that makes the most sense based on the time of day.
The other thing is batch work. If there are certain types of work, you should put them together. If I'm shooting videos, I'm going to shoot a bunch of videos. Interviews are always batch work because that mindset, that creativity, that focus makes a lot of sense. I'd much rather push back on other people's calendars to meet mine than make exceptions and then try to context switch.
Most people realize there is no context switching. For example, if I ask you to count from 1 to 26 as fast as you could, most people do it in about 5 and a half seconds. If I ask you to spell out the alphabet—A, B, C, D, E, F, G—all the way to the end, most people do it in about four and a half to five seconds.
If I then ask you to go 1-A, 2-B and context switch in between each one, most people lose track and can't even finish. If you do finish, it takes you about a minute to a minute and a half. So, we're talking 20 times more time multitasking. Everybody says, "Oh, I'm a great multitasker." No, you're not.
Batching similar things together so that you can go 30-minute intervals of just attacking something until it's done will yield huge productivity gains.
Finally, net time. For me, net time stands for "no extra time." How do I accomplish things and do other stuff at the same time? For example, most meetings in person with people that are new, that I've never met before, are scheduled for Tuesday morning at 6:30 a.m., and we're hiking up a mountain. Why do I do that? Because I want to know that they're serious and that they really want to meet with me.
I do other things like meetings with my team on my internal road bike, where I have a setup with my TV and my trainer. I use Zwift, so I can be on a low cadence Zone 2 bike ride for three hours and do three hours of internal meetings to help the business move things forward.
I also love to read while I'm in the hot tub. So, when I'm doing recovery or taking a mini break, I'm going to feed my mind. Some people do these things separately. I consume past meetings; I can listen to them on 2x speed while I'm running. When I'm traveling, I've paid people's plane tickets to come travel with me so that while I'm in flight, I'm having conversations with people I've been meaning to have.
It's worth that investment to get that time to be more productive. You should consider this concept in all areas of your life: where can you get more leverage out of the same unit of time by doing more than one thing to move your life forward?
Being a high-performing CEO requires you to be intentional about your calendar by focusing on the major projects and blocking out your time. That's really why I wrote "Buy Back Your Time"—to teach people ways that I've been able to achieve an incredible amount of output while also taking 12 weeks a year off on vacation or travel and doing things every month with my family or friends.
So, if you want to learn how I've done that, be sure to check out my book at buybackyourtime.com. Click the link, grab your copy, and I'll see you next week!