Type: Exercise
Topic: Time Management
Time: One hour or less
Benefits: Allows you to better manage the stress associated with excessive travel. Affords you the opportunity to take charge of planning for key events like board meetings, earnings calls, investor meetings, and leadership retreats.
There will always be more demands on a CEO’s time than there will be time to address those demands. If you aren’t careful and intentional, days and years can both quickly spiral out of control. This exercise is designed to help you take a pre-emptive look at an entire year with the specific goal of scheduling events, as best as possible, to maximize your effectiveness at those events.
Of course, many of those events are scheduled by others, but some events at your company and in your personal life can be within your control. This process will help you determine the best times for scheduling those events within your control, and also provide you with evidence for when you will most need to be on top of your time-management game in the year ahead.
Below you will find a 2017 calendar to print for this exercise.
Step One: Begin by placing major, immovable events on your calendar. These include:
Then block off the time periods you will need to prepare for, travel to, and follow up from those events (perhaps with a different color pen).
Step Two: This level is for events dictated by standard business practices and rhythms. These include earnings calls and various end-of-quarter activities. Again, also block out the time you will need to invest in preparing for and following up after these events.
Step Three: This level is for family or personal events where scheduling is outside of your control. These might include weddings, graduations, reunions, and scheduled commitments for your nonprofit or charity work. Again, block off the time you will need for travel or preparation as well as the dates of the events themselves.
Step Four: Here you begin to determine your own schedule, and I strongly suggest that vacation is the first priority—especially since you might need to coordinate this with your spouse and other family members. Take a look at where you can schedule this time off without bringing major business tasks with you when you really need to be relaxing and recharging, or escaping into stimulating adventures that will renew you for the months ahead.
Step Five: This level is for the business-related trips you will need to take in the year ahead. Customer trips, international trips, non-deal road shows, president award trips, potential investor meetings, subsidiary milestones, and visits to properties for occasions or announcements are within your control, and should now be fit into the schedule where they will not interfere with the events already on your calendar. Remember to block out preparation and travel time as well.
Step Six: Here you schedule your major on-site or nearby meetings and events. Examples include leadership retreats and all-day meetings. By now your calendar may be feeling rather crowded, and it’s important to make sure, whenever possible, that you schedule these meetings, and their preparation, during periods of time when you will not be needing to focus your attention on higher-level events.
Step Seven: This is an opportunity to take a moment and listen to yourself. You’ve put down on your calendar all the types of things that I could think of, but every company, and every CEO, is different. Take a few moments to still yourself, perhaps using a breathing exercise, and then ask your very smart self what else is important to include on this calendar. It might be an event or time requirement that is unique to your business. It might be a commitment to one day where you take yourself away for a strategy review. Take a few minutes and listen to your own wisdom about what else needs to be included in this calendar.
Final Steps: This calendar is not just for you, although it is primarily for you. Naturally, you will need to share with your organization those events you have just scheduled that will impact others in the company. You might also want to consider whether some form of this exercise might be helpful for your team, or others in your organization.