How CEOs Schedule Their Day

Welcome to the Growth Stacking Podcast. This is Dan Martell. This is what my schedule looks like as the CEO of a multi million dollar company. When I first started, it was hectic. Then I had human alarm clocks, I had my first son Max, and then Noah. And all of a sudden now I couldn't stay up till two in the morning to get caught up. What I want to share with you is how I've designed my life and my calendar to to be able to be the most effective CEO for the people that report to me. The first thing is even though I have a morning routine and that kind of ramps up my body and my mind so that I can focus, it's really about getting the big rocks moving forward. Your first 90 minutes of your day, minimum, should be focused on your number one priority, the one thing, the leading domino. If you got that done, everything else in your life would get easier. Typically it's stuff around fundraising, business development, sales, marketing. Whatever area of your business has got a blockage right now, you should wake up and should attack it violently. 90 minutes every day. But my morning is really left pretty much until noon for my creative work, for my output. What I don't do is I don't sit there on my phone and start getting into my inbox or looking at my WhatsApp. I get up, I execute, it's planned the night before. I know exactly what I need to do to move the business forward. I don't get distracted by a bunch of demands on my time. The second aspect about my calendar, if you looked at it, is that I don't have white space. I don't have 15 minutes here, I don't have 30 minutes there. Everything is allocated. So my assistant and I will sit down the week before and we'll look at the calendar. And if There is a 90 minute block or a 30 minute window or 15 minutes in between meetings, we're always looking to fill it. And I have different types of meetings that I'll do. So a 15 minute is great for a first time new connection with where I don't even know if this is somebody I have an opportunity to do any work with, but I want to take the meeting. So usually a quick 15 minutes, 30 minutes are used for business partners, leaders that report to me, people I want to invest in, coach them, and we use those 30 minutes. Anything above that. I'm always asking myself, what projects could I accelerate if I allocated that open time to a project that's on the next 90 minute window of key boulders and rocks? I got to push up the mountain so I don't do lead time. See, a lot of people just allow themselves to have that space to like, recover and do email. I block my email time, I block my social media time, my personal time, date nights, spending time with my kids. It's all in there. From the time I wake up at four in the morning till I pass out at nine o' clock at night, it is allocated. So I never wonder if I'm getting behind on different parts of my life, because my whole life is designed into the day and the week. If you looked at my calendar, you would see that my day is designed for energy. So there's a reason why I do certain workouts in the morning. Then I do my creative work. Then I usually have some kind of reset for lunch. I get into meetings, calls, collaborations, external meetings that if I got to go look at projects or deals, and then I usually like to wind down before dinner with my kids because I want to make sure that I kind of close down any open loops so I can be focused for the meal. And usually every night it's either, you know, going mountain biking with friends, spending time with my wife, date night, we do group date nights, we'll go wake surf. But essentially I use the day and the energy, my natural internal kind of feeling, to be able to show up, to do the type of work that makes the most sense based on the time of day. The other thing is batch work. If there's certain types of work, you should put them together. So if I'm shooting videos, I'm going to shoot a bunch of videos, podcast interviews, always batch work. Because that mindset, that creativity, that focus, focus makes a lot of sense. And I'd much rather push back on other people's calendars to meet mine than make exceptions. And then I'm trying to context switch. Most people don't realize there is no context switching. For example, if I asked you to count from 1 to 26 as fast as you could, most people do it in about five and a half seconds, spell out the Alphabet, A, B, C, D, E, F, G all the way to the end. Most people do it in about 4 and a half, 5 seconds. If I then ask you to go 1, A, 2, B and context switch in between each one, most people lose track and just can't even finish. If you do finish, it takes you about a minute to a minute and a half. So we're talking 20 times more time multitasking that everybody says, oh, I'm a great multitasker. No, you're not batching similar things together so that you can go 30 minute intervals of just attacking something until it's done will get you huge yield in your productivity. And then finally net time. So so for me net time stands for no extra time. How do I accomplish things and do other stuff at the same time? So for example, most meetings in person with people that are new that I've never met before, we're doing them Tuesday morning at 6:30am and we're hiking up a mountain. Why do I do that? Because I want to know that they're serious that they really want to meet with me. I do other things like do meetings with my team on my internal road bike where I have a setup with my TV and my trainer. I use Zwift that that way I can be on a low cadence zone 2 bike ride for three hours and do three hours of internal meetings to help the businesses move things forward. I love to also read while I'm in the hot tub. So when I'm doing recovery or I'm kind of taking a mini break, I'm going to feed my mind. See some people they like do these things as separate consuming past meetings. I can listen to them on 2x speed while I'm running. When I'm traveling, I've paid people's plane ticket to come travel with me so that while I'm in flight I I'm having conversations with people I've been meaning to have. It's worth that investment to get that time to be more productive. And that concept you should consider in all areas of your life. Where can you get more leverage out of the same unit of time by doing more than one thing to move your life forward. Being a high performing CEO requires you to be intentional about your calendar by focusing on the major projects by blocking out your time. And that's really why I wrote Buy Back youk Time is so that I could teach people ways that I've been able to get incredible amount of output and at the Same time take 12 weeks a year off on vacation or travel and do things every month with my family or with my friends. So if you wanna learn how I've done that, be sure to check out my book buybackyourtime.com click the link, grab your copy. I'll see you next week. If you like this week's episode, be sure to visit itunes, leave a review that'll help us get in of other founders just like you. And if you're looking for more resources and video trainings, be sure to check out dan martell2lsmartell.com to subscribe. Keep up the hustle, keep stacking your growth and I'll see you in next Monday's episode. Peace. Grow Peace. Bye bye.