The No. 1 Cause of Overwhelm in SaaS CEOs.
We reveal the time management trick deployed by the world's most successful CEOs.
How’s your time management? Ever cancel a 121? Have back to back meetings all day? Struggle for strategic thinking time?
If so you will be both relieved & horrified to discover you are in a bucket with the vast majority of SaaS leaders. CEOs & founders in particular.
Time poverty is without exception the number one challenge that SaaS CEOs face when they focus on their personal effectiveness.
Time poverty is without exception the number one challenge that SaaS CEOs face when they focus on their personal effectiveness, strategic time planning and leadership productivity.
I’m going to share my Time Block Framework that I use to ensure my time is spent well, and on the right things. We have adapted it multiple times now for the 40+ CEOs that I currently coach.
It is grounded in the legendary Michael Porter’s work (he of Competitive Advantage) - and zeros in on splitting the working day into 15 minute blocks. You can read more on his work on this here in HBR.
Like you, I could fill every hour of the day with work. I enjoy work, it’s not even really work - it’s enormous fun. But that doesn’t prevent stress & anxiety when I know I’ve dropped the ball, or failed to prioritize what’s really important.
Right now at Revelesco we have the Whole Revenue Summit in June which is taking huge chunks of time to make it the perfect CEO experience. We have three live Whole Revenue Strategy projects - which require plenty of thinking time on top of the workshops themselves. I have 41 coachees to work with & think about. We have a team of 8 to work with and care about. Growth planning, cashflow, the roll-call is endless.
So how do you conquer this level of intensity? How do you prevent yourself from flaming out?
The model I have developed has six steps and Rhoda (our awesome & long time EA) and I go through it four times a year.
Step 1
How much time do you actually have in a typical week? Let’s itemize the hour count. My clients rarely give a 40 hour working week answer but most of them have families & there are boundaries they need to set for the sake of their loved ones and their own mental health. Let’s say it’s 50 hours across a 7 day week.
Now we break this down into 15 minute chunks. Why? 15 minutes is enough time to accomplish a small task, to answer a few yes/ no emails, or even to run a brief well structured meeting. Much less than 15 minutes and you barely have time to grab a coffee.
A 50 hour week has 750 15 minute blocks. Each of these blocks will need to be allocated when we get to Step 3.
Grab a copy of the detailed spreadsheet which supports this framework.
Step 2
What are your priorities? If you can list out more than 3 then you’re not prioritizing properly - there should never be more than 3 objectives in any given time period.
If you’re struggling with this it’s time to get ruthless. Many organizations run OKRs. If you do then your objectives will probably be exactly what you have in your daily OKR sheet.
We should be expecting to allocate at least 80% of our time to these three core objectives. In this example, 600 15 minute blocks.
The remaining 20% - 150 blocks - are reserved for what I call, context. That is the non-core stuff that you can’t delete or delegate. Submitting expenses for example. Important stuff but not remotely critical to your objectives.
Step 3
Now you’re going to allocate the time blocks. I currently have 22 categories of time consumption. Some are obvious: Upstream meetings with investors & peers; candidate interviews, 121s.
Some are less obvious: how much time do you allocate to crisis management each week? There’s almost always a fire to put out. So why not plan for it?
How do you know what quantity to put in each cell? I look back over my calendar over the last 3 months and draw conclusions based on how I have actually been allocating my time.
When this is complete you will almost certainly find a significant delta. In other words there is not enough time in the week to do everything that is required.
Step 4
More ruthlessness incoming. If you have a delta, or an imbalance in the time you are spending on your three objectives, now is the time to do some rebalancing. We need to get this to the point where you have zero delta.
The CEO cannot be a bottleneck.
What about tasks that are critical but rarely seem urgent? How much time do you actively spend on focused strategic thinking each week? What about walking the floor and talking with your team? How well prepared are you for every meeting? Does your board pack go out at least a week before the actual meeting takes place?
Get your spreadsheet to zero time debt before moving on.
Step 5
If you have an EA they can be very helpful in this final step. If not, back over to you. Before you start playing around with your calendar software you’re going to build your new fantasy agenda in a spreadsheet.
Start with the stuff you can’t control. Maybe you meet the chair each week - and this is restricted to a particular day of the week. Maybe you run a town hall on a Monday morning that the entire team has in their diaries.
After this add in the items which require your brain to be fully focused. Are you a morning person? Probably don’t schedule strategic/ creative thinking for the afternoon then.
Next add in the essential meetings that contribute to the objectives.
Finally add in the non-meeting time-blocks. So many leaders start with an OK calendar and then find it is abused and overbooked by the rest of the company. If people steal your gaps, block them off.
Block off prep time for almost all meetings. If the meeting is worthwhile & you’re gonna keep it short & tight; it will require pre-work.
Step 6
Review it. You probably won’t get it right the first time. So review over the course of the first month what went well & what didn’t. Could you be even more ruthless? Did you attend any single meeting and ask yourself - what was the point in that? If so, edit your agenda.
Ultimately what we’re trying to get to is that every 15 minutes of your day are in the service of growth & scale, and not wasted. It’s so easy to say, so hard to do.
If you want a more detailed deep dive on this, reach out & we can discuss together.
And don’t forget - time is running out to book into the Whole Revenue Summit where some of the world’s most successful thinkers & CEOs will be discussing the unthinkably hard role of the CEO and how to make it through in one piece. I hope to see you there.
Feel free to email us on this or anything else on enquire@revelesco.com at any point.
Pete & the Revelesco team.