Without question, your time is your scarcest resource. There is only one of you in your company—and you can't hire a second you. Figuring out how to get the most out of your day is a critical skill. Figuring out how to optimize your team is an incredibly important part of managing yourself.
In this chapter, I'll discuss managing your agenda, managing your calendar and managing your time. Think of these three sections in descending order of abstraction. Managing your agenda means understanding generally what you're supposed to be doing. Managing your calendar means making time for those things. Managing your time means being as productive as possible at those things as well as doing all of the important (or unimportant) distractions that invariably come up in your day.
While I'm going to talk about a few different tools for managing my time throughout this chapter, I generally refer to all of these tools together as my Operating System. Just as your company has an Operating System, you should have one, too.
Where Does Your Operating System Live?
I keep my Operating System in Excel but you can use any system you want: I know CEOs who keep their Operating Systems in Outlook, Google Drive, Evernote, and a range of other tools. There's no magic to any particular tool as long as you can access your Operating System 24/7 on whatever device you happen to have at any point in time. Whatever and wherever your Operating System is, you have to absolutely live in it and look at it multiple times per day. I typically keep it open all the time on my dual-monitor display.
Having a really tight Operating System starts with having a really tight agenda. Your agenda is your job description, overlaid with a sense of current priorities. (If you're struggling with the overall picture of your job description, this book should have been a good starting point for you!)
Here are some questions I keep in the Agenda tab of my Operating System document:
In my To Do tab, I input the answers to all of those questions—especially “What's most important, right now?”—and turn them into tasks and projects. Each item on the To Do tab has a due date for its next step. That column is color-coded around its deadline (red = “Today/Past,” yellow = “Upcoming in the Next Week,” white = “Further Out in the Future”). The column is sortable by topic area as well as due date. Again, this spreadsheet is up on my second monitor all day long, so any time there is a spare moment, I can review it and start working on the critical upcoming items.
Once a month, I go back, review the Agenda tab, make sure it's current, then review the To Do tab to make sure it flows from the Agenda tab.
Since my agenda is, in some respects, the company's agenda—and since I follow David Allen's principles in Getting Things Done of having all of this stuff listed in one place—my Excel document has a series of other tabs in it as well:
All-in, tight management of your agenda, with whatever system you use, is a critical starting point for managing your time.
An Essential Time Management Resource
Although my Operating System has evolved a lot over the years and has had a lot of influences contribute to its structure and purpose, probably the largest influence on it has been David Allen's seminal work on personal productivity, Getting Things Done. If you're a CEO and you haven't read this book, read it now!
With your overall agenda set, you can now start planning out your calendar in weeks, months, quarters and even a full year. Here are some of the key building-block elements to my calendar and how I think about them in relation to each other and to the rest of my Operating System (note that these track pretty closely with some of the main elements of the Company Operating System that I described in Chapter 17):
Having the major building blocks of your calendar set for a year or a quarter means you're likely to avoid scheduling conflicts with your most important meetings. That's a good start. Once you have all of that set, you can start to manage your time more effectively.
I have historically been very open with my calendar. For most of my career, people who want to meet with me, both internally and externally (with the exception of random vendor solicitation) generally have gotten to meet with me. Some of this is generosity but I'm also a compulsive networker and have always made time proactively to meet with people just to meet them; learn more about different pockets of the industry or finance; meet other entrepreneurs and find out what they're up to or help them; and connect more broadly from there. I've also routinely been on multiple boards at the same time, as I've found that's a very helpful part of my management routine.
As the company has gotten larger and more geographically spread out—and as my kids have arrived, accompanied by a house with a longer commute—I've taken to being more judicious with my time. I could probably do an even better job at it but I've started taking control much more of the minutes in my day. As anyone on my team will tell you who pops into my office, sends me an instant message or calls me, my initial response is always, “just a second,” as I insist on finishing whatever quick task or thought I'm working on before engaging with the person. I'm increasingly reducing meeting times from 60 minutes to 30 or from 30 to 15. I'm also more frequently responding to requests on my time with things like “can you send an email for starters?” so I can respond asynchronously. I have to respond to requests for meetings with the occasional “no, that's just something I don't have time for now.”
My executive assistant (see the following chapter) has been playing a larger role in helping me structure things so that I have blocks of free time during the day and I make sure I “schedule” time to work on major things that I know will take up a lot of time.
One tool I've developed over the years to serve as a feedback loop or check on my Operating System is a simple time allocation model.
First, I am religious about keeping an accurate calendar—including travel time between meetings or on planes—and I go back and clean up meetings after they have happened to make the calendar an accurate reflection of what transpired after the fact. At the end of each quarter, my assistant downloads the prior three months' worth of meetings and we categorize them to see where my time went. Then, we make changes to the upcoming quarter's calendar to match targets based on my agenda. For what it's worth, my categories have changed over time but they have always been pretty high level. Currently, they are “Free,” “Travel,” “Internal,” “Board,” “Client/External,” and “Non-work” (by which I mean outside business activities like serving on other boards). See Figure 40.1 for a sample of this time analysis.
Looking at the buckets in isolation in a given quarter isn't so useful but looking at the trends over time and comparing them to where I tell myself I want to be spending my time has been really helpful in keeping me proactive and on track. I routinely generate conclusions like “Wow! I need to cut back on travel!” or “I wasn't in-market enough last quarter.” The kinds of shifts you can make are to be proactive instead of so reactive; to cut meetings, shrink them or group them when appropriate internally; to use video-conferencing instead of travel where possible—and to be just a little more selfish and guarded with your time.
Management Moment
Don't Be a Bottleneck
You don't have to be an Inbox-Zero nut (though feel free if you'd like!) but you do need to make sure you don't have people in the company chronically waiting on you before they can take their next actions. Otherwise, you lose all the leverage you have in hiring a team. Don't let approvals or requests pile up. I worked for a guy once who constantly had a line of people at his door waiting for his comments or approvals on things. This was in the days of the paper inbox and people were constantly going into his office, finding the thing they'd left for him in his inbox and moving it to the top of the pile in the hope that he'd get to it sooner so they could continue their work.
As you have a larger and larger team, your job is much less about getting good work done than it is enabling others to get good work done. If you're a bottleneck, you're not doing your job.
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