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Designing Your Time

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You are in control of your calendar

If you're in a hypergrowth company, your calendar will quickly begin to control you if you don't proactively control it first — especially at the executive level. Remember that you are in the driver's seat. You are not the passenger to your own calendar. This means you need to block out the time you need to do your job effectively. Here's how we recommend you do that:

Four Types of Work

Building off Paul Graham's excellent "Maker's Schedule, Manager's Schedule" essay, we think about work getting done in one of four areas as described below. Each executive needs to spend a different amount of time in each box. You must block your calendar out proactively to ensure you can get the work done you need to, and you can then let your calendar fill in around that proactive design of your time.

🚀 Pro-tip: Proactively block out your calendar to carve out the time you need for the important work that may not feel as urgent and is often in the "making" category below. Connor Drake has great advice for how to successfully do this in Founder Excellence through Leverage (Strategic + Tactical Pro-tips) AMA with Connor Drake and Time Management for Mortals is an excellent framework as well.


INTERNALLY FOCUSED

"Within the walls" of your company

Work you're doing with contractors, employees, board members, advisors, mentors, etc.

EXTERNALLY FOCUSED

"Outside the walls" of your company

Work you're doing with users, customers, partners, vendors, etc.

MANAGING:

  • Interactions that don't create an "artifact" that persists after the time is spent
  • Typically happen in smaller chunks (30 mins, 1 hour, etc) and be done back-to-back.
  • Often around aligning humans

Examples:

  • Any internal meetings, like All Hands, 1:1s, OKRs, staff meetings, board meetings, etc.
  • Strategic planning sessions.
  • Team offsites
  • Is often urgent but may not be important

Examples:

  • Customer Discovery calls
  • Sales calls
  • Emailing / Slacking users
  • Answering Customer support tickets
  • Is often urgent and important

MAKING:

  • Interactions that do create an "artifact" that persists after the time is spent
  • Typically require larger blocks (2+ hours) of uninterrupted focus time
  • Often around building product

Examples:

  • Building activities like writing code for a product
  • Implementing an internal system like Zendesk or Salesforce, etc.
  • Creating an operating model in Excel
  • Creating training material
  • Designing a website
  • Is often important but may not feel urgent

Examples:

"The Big Shift"

A related point around designing your time in a hypergrowth environment is moving from a time-oriented world to a priority-oriented one. Jason Polites wrote a great blog post back in 2013 called The Big Shift where he said:

This missing ingredient is a mental and philosophical shift that needs to take place across the entire organization. It is a change in thinking more difficult, yet more important than almost any other change in modern professional life. It is a change from thinking about companies and projects in terms of time, to thinking in terms of priority.
This is The Big Shift.
In a time-oriented world, things are done by a certain time or date. “We will deliver X by date A, then we will deliver Y by date B”. Or more specifically, expectations are set around time based variables. In a priority driven world there are no times, only priorities. “We will focus on delivering X before we focus on delivering Y”

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