Wrestle your schedules to the ground and make those calendars work for you — and your teams.

Hey, folks, I’m not lying when I tell you I had at least three conversations last week with entrepreneurs who were pulling their hair out because meetings were disrupting their days and preventing them from getting . . . stuff done.

My interpretation of their plight was that they allowed different kinds of meetings on different days to fill up their schedules, giving them little or, at any rate, insufficient time to plan, think, inspire, dream and create — in other words, to do the things a founder is best equipped to do.

I asked them when they had their “one-on-ones,” when they had weekly team meetings, when they met with their marketing firm or other outside resources. Sure enough, these meetings cropped up through the entire week and left little time for individual work. I suggested that maybe they could take their weeks and optimize them based on what would make them most efficient.

Using Google Calendar, we constructed what I call the “optimal week,” which is not a schedule based on all the meetings other people want you to be in or lead, but a proactive schedule of how you are going to allot the right amount of time to the right thing at the right time.

Let’s run through my week to show you what I mean.

Monday — Friday

I have three time slots that are unchanging Monday — Friday. These are the periods that anchor me and provide personal time. They include:

6:15am — 9am Morning Routine: I take care of personal matters: get my youngest daughter ready for high school, eat breakfast, work out and so on.
12:00pm — 12:50pm: Lunch and Lessons: I’m a voracious reader of books, blogs, podcasts, you name it. This is a chance to enjoy a healthy lunch and recharge my batteries.
2:30pm — 3:00pm: Meditation helps me reenergize and be at my best.

Monday

I start off every Monday with administration and planning and then some flex time around Findaway Adventures current investments.

Tuesday

Mornings are devoted to GSD (getting “stuff” done). This involves heads down project work, things with deadlines and so forth.
Afternoons are set aside for business development, which for me often means reading lots of decks or having individual meetings with prospective investments. These hours on Tuesday and Thursday are the only hours that will appear as “open” to prospects on my Ccalendly calendar.

Wednesday

Wednesdays are set aside for the Findaway Club, the mastermind initiative we’ve launched to give change-the-world founders direct access to the best thinking and tools for growing their businesses. The day is spent developing content, lining up guest speakers and expert panelists etc.

Thursday

On Thursdays, I pick up where I left off on Tuesdays with business development.

Friday

This is one-on-one time to plan and problem solve with the founders of Findaway Adventures and the companies in which we’ve invested.

Sunday

Every Sunday evening before dinner, I spend at least 45 minutes looking ahead to my week and moving things around to be sure my goals are covered.

Good for you, good for you team

When you organize your week in this way, you not only create time and space to be more productive yourself, you also create a model that makes your whole team more productive. Adapted to your own business and personal lifestyle, this model works for a team of one, a start-up of five to 10 people, or a larger company.

For example, we rolled out a form of this model when I was the CEO of a larger company with a couple hundred employees. We wanted to block out days with no meetings and allow our leadership team time to do more project work. We designated certain days for internal, external and even cross-functional meetings. And you now what? Everybody lined up underneath it, which made the whole company more efficient.

Optimizing your week provides clarity for the rest of your organization to know when you’re going to have these meetings, and it helps you drive results by doing what Stephen Covey suggests and making time for the “important but not urgent.”

So take a shot at this. Use Google Calendar or some other tool and optimize your week. And, please, let me know of anything else you’re doing to organize your time. I love new ideas and truly appreciate all the change-the-world founders who are on the journey with us.

Sincerely,

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All credit to my ghostwriting partner, Dave Moore, who is instrumental in getting my thoughts out in a coherent manner & into these blogs. Thanks Dave!

Founders, Take Back Your Week! (Video)