Simon Sinek explains his personal time-management approach: he strictly uses and protects his calendar by blocking recurring time (e.g., an entire Friday or specific hourly blocks) for creative work and exercise. He treats those blocks as non-negotiable for others, only shifting them for very important commitments, and emphasizes building balance by design into his weekly schedule.
Chapters
Believe it or not, I use my schedule. I mean, I'm a slave to my schedule like so many other people. And I open my schedule and I go, okay, that's my week.
And so I literally build the balance in. I will block off an entire Friday, for example, and though I will work on Fridays, no one is allowed to schedule anything on a Friday. So I. I've no pre. Scheduled anything on a Friday. And that allows me to have creative time, but it allows me to build in that balance. And I've been doing that for years. And it wasn't necessarily a whole Friday. Sometimes it was a few hours. So between these hours and these hours, you know, this hour and this hour, I wouldn't schedule anything. And I was protective of it. So, for example, and like, we think of things like working out, you know, we think of these things as flexible or we put in creative time. We think of it as flexible. And somebody says, oh, can I see you at 3:00'? Clock? And you look in your calendar and you know, three o' clock was your workout or three o' clock was your, your creative time. And you go, yeah, I can do three. And I say, oh, sorry, I have something else at three. What? You know, do you have any other options? Yeah, I am very protective now. It's not ideal sometimes. If it's very important, of course I'll. I can make the shift. But I'm. I'm really protective of those, of those blocks that I block out for working out or for, for creative time. They're just, they're not available. They don't have to know why I can't see them. Sure. You know, I don't think anybody wants to know. I can't meet with you because I'm working out. But sometimes that's what it is. I'm just really protective of those times.
