Master Your Calendar and Manage Your Time With Roland Frasier and Ryan Deiss

I fight like heck against having anybody get on my calendar in the first place. The only people I want on my calendar, the only things I want on my calendar are the things that I'm have some meaningful time with and the other stuff I can handle and I don't need it on my calendar because it's just I can deal with it within the extra time that I've got.

How much more successful would you be if you had lunch once a week with insanely successful entrepreneurs who share their biggest secrets on how they think and achieve success? Grab your seat at the table because this is Business Lunch with Roland Frazier and Ryan Deiss. Welcome to another episode of Business Lunch. And today's a snackable episode with Roland where he's going to get into some more tactical strategies that you can start using to live a rich and happy life. If this is the first snackable episode you're hearing, I'd encourage you to go back and listen to some of the other episodes that Roland has put out. And if you want to get notified every time we release a new episode, go to the new businesslunchpodcast.com website and we'll send you detailed notes along with every episode. That's businesslunchpodcast.com www.businesslunchpodcast.com and you can sign up for the free email newsletter where you'll be able to get all the highlights and resources from the episodes.

Hey everybody.

Roland Frazier and Ryan Deiss here with another episode of Business Lunch. Today we're gonna talk about calendars. Ryan, you wanna share what your thoughts were on that?

Calendars, time management, often things. Yeah, so there's, I guess a pretty well known business entrepreneurial influencer who posted on Instagram and Twitter basically saying, hey, I run a $200 million company and this is my calendar. And look, I know we're on a podcast here so people can't necessarily see it, so I'm just going to describe it. But essentially it starts at like 5am and so there's, you know, prepping for meetings, sending out some emails, doing some basic sorting that's from like 5 to 7am, then from 7 to 9 is the gym, then there seems to be a little bit of a break and then it's getting into, you know, meetings, then there's lunch, then there's some more meetings, then there's a time block and then from 7 to 8:30, dinner. And this kind of trend where really busy, cluttered calendar with time blocking, these are things I've always found interesting because, you know, Entrepreneurs, some people really love this. They geek out on it and they've got their different calendaring system. But it was funny because it was like split. When I looked at the comments, 50% of people were like, this is amazing. This is inspiring. Thank you for being so transparent. And then the other half was like, this is insane. Some people were being kind of snarky and they were saying, you know, I run a $60 million company and here's my calendar. And it was like completely empty. So I'm just kind of curious. I mean, I'd love to talk about season when people start thinking about time management maybe not working as much. So I'm just curious from, from your perspective, how do you approach the calendar? Do you have your days like in a given week, is it already blocked out in 15 minute increment kind of things? What are you doing?

Well, I come from the legal world, practicing law, where we had to bill for every 15 minutes of our time to keep track of it, which I absolutely hated doing by the way. Started with timesheets and then eventually had software that did it. Like, I live by the calendar. That's what I tell my family. They're like, you know, what about this? And I'm like, it's on the calendar. Look at the calendar. So I have my calendar shared with the team and the team can book stuff for me and I have it shared with my family and they can book stuff and then I'm booking stuff as well. That is a very significant part of what manages my days. And if I need to block out time, I will block out time. Like she's got lunch blocked out and stuff like that. I do the same thing. I don't really do it with dinner because I don't generally try to work into the night. There's not a lot of risk of somebody booking a meeting at 6 because I would kill them. But I mean, yeah, man, I was just looking as we were talking back through the last month and it's pretty booked up. You know, I get up generally around four these days I just don't book things and don't allow people to things during the times that I'm going to have dinner or you know, something like that. So my mornings generally start. Meetings don't start before 7am which gives me two or three hours to, you know, start the day, wake up, work out, do my, I call my chores, you know, feed the dogs and the cats and all those kinds of things and then prep for what does the day look like? Because I find that if I prep for the day, I will get more done. And I just recently read a thing that said that having too many things on your to do list also causes you to not get things done because you just get overwhelmed by them and don't do them. There was an app I think it was called Commit to three that I was using for a while and I really like having three things that I decide in the morning that I want to accomplish during the day and if I get more done than that, I got plenty that works well. But yeah, I'm charted out pretty much by, I won't let people book our meetings anymore. It's like the default on Apple calendar is annoying. And it's an hour. So many people that book meetings, book hour meetings. It's like that's a 20 minute meeting. And then I have to text them and say don't book our meetings for something that's going to take 20 or 30 minutes. Or I'll do a decline and suggest the time that it should be. But it's pretty specific. I mean it's not terribly different than that. And there are times when it's really, really busy and there are times when it's not you. And I have an event coming up on Tuesday and I'm still annoyed because despite asking the people that scheduled it, booked an entire eight hour block of time and didn't send invites for the specific sessions that we're supposed to do. Two things. One is I'm not going to block out my entire day. And two, I don't know what sessions I'm supposed to show up for. Right.

I do that.

How about yourself? I don't know how. You don't.

So you live in Diabear, your calendar. And one thing that I appreciate about this, that she did, and I feel the same way and I heard it from you as well. I've got a single calendar and it's got my personal stuff and my business stuff. I get in the biggest trouble by having two different calendars as though I'm two different people.

Well, and then your family can't see what you're doing. They don't know your commitments.

Right? They don't. They don't know. And it's like, oh, I didn't know you had that. And it's like, so one calendar. But you're the same thing. It is. All the stuff that you're doing pretty much, you know, are dropped in there. All the meetings for a given day, Is there any? Do you try to stick to a particular rhythm? Like do you Put blocks. Like looking at her calendar and she talked about this, there's very clear blocks in here. Blocks for creative work, blocks for meetings. And I know I've tried in the past and it's worked to varying degrees where I would put a block and I would try to make sure that all my meetings went in that block. And I would let people in the company, if they wanted to schedule a meeting, they could put a meeting in that block. And what I ultimately decided was like, I don't want to do that. Like, you can request the meeting if it's in this block, but nobody just gets to put a meeting on my calendar. So do you work within blocks and things like that, or is it. Pretty much. It's different from week to week, day to day.

Yeah. So the cool thing that I like is that you can accept or reject events, you know, accept or decline. It's too hard and too much wasted time when somebody's going back and forth with me trying to do something, which is why I shared the calendar with, particularly with my family and the team. So they'll send an invite and then I'll decline or accept based on what I know I need to get done. And then I can have a conversation about it if I need to. But generally people know Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday within the constraints of the standing. Things that are. That I've got like coaching calls or things like that, that I'm available generally between nine and five to have meetings and they don't have to ask, they can book them and you know, I'll accept or decline. If I decline it, then it'll be for a reason and I'll text them back and say, well, I've got this other thing I need to get done or something like that. I generally try not to book things on Mondays and Fridays. That's. That's kind of generally what works best for me. I do all my meetings between X and Y on these days. That's why calendly doesn't work for me either. It's just a. I've got too many calendars that all do integrate together. Right. But it just didn't work because I don't want to have to have meetings between these hours on these days. Maybe I've got to create. You and I both have creative things we have to do too, which is hard because when you need to write a book or create a course or do create content or something like that, the muse has to strike. You can't just. I can't anyway just turn that on and say Right now I'm going to come up with some amazing thing to talk about that's going to be fun that, you know, I just can't. So when that strikes, I have to have time in my day to be able to do that. I try to leave some gaps for that. I don't book that as creative time because I think scheduling creative time is not creative.

That's an interesting way to look at it. The way I've thought about it. To me, there's like four types of work. And I've loosely tried to block my calendar, but to me it's merely a suggestion. I've tried everything, and ultimately what I've kind of figured out is if I can have a general framework, that's fine, but if I force everything into that framework, then it becomes less about getting stuff done and more just about abiding by this arbitrary framework. So for me, like, there's four types of work. Like the work that is kind of the. This is my kind of natural genius type work that for me, at least in the. And a lot of the work that I'm doing. And I think the same is true for you. I think it's true for a lot of folks. Generally, I'm by myself. It doesn't always have to be that way. There's plenty of people. If you're like an operator, a meeting or a strategy session could be your flow state work, because you need to be in a room facilitating something. But I think we all need to be clear on, like, okay, what is the work that I do that really moves the needle? Right. And I think the first thing I do is just. Just get clear on that. Um, and the second is. Is collaborative work. Right. So there are times when I just need to talk to other people. Right. You and I just need to have a conversation. I wouldn't define that as necessarily being like flow state worker, but it's necessary. I need to talk to the team. I need to call me today. I know. You do this like, we're planning a. A family vacation this next summer. I'm on hold with an Italian hotel. Right. You know, to do. I got to collaborate with them to see if I can get rooms next to one. Like, that's just an aspect of anybody's life. Yeah. Then there's like the menial task you mentioned chores. And then there's the piece. The fourth type that I think a lot of people don't think about as work, and therefore they don't block out any of their time for it. And that's Transformative work. This is the intentional time that we spend to get better, right. To improve. And so it could be intentional time reading. Maybe it's working with a coach, maybe it's, you know, being in a mastermind group or something like that. But it's like the intentional time of like, how do I make sure that I'm a little, you know, bigger, better, smarter, faster tomorrow than I was today. Right. That transformative work. So those four types, what I've now tried to basically do is to say I'm going to intentionally block out at the start of every week. I pretty much know that if I get these three things done, you know, by at some point this week, I can basically say it was a good week, it was a productive week. If I don't define that ahead of time, then it's bad because it's always now. It's just how do I get as much done as possible, which is an exhausting thing. So you have to decide ahead of time this is what winning is. And yeah, same deal for me I found maybe it's one, maybe it's two, but if it's more than three, it's going to be tough. So I'll try to block that out on my calendar. And if between that and like the collaborative work, I really try to have that be less than 20 hours or less in a given week. Right? 20 hours or less in a given week. And if it's more than that, that's when I find that I start to get burned out because the menial stuff, the things that you didn't expect to need to work on. But o, yeah, you do like this idea that I can just magically plan out my week and nothing will come up. I won't need to move something around or take a last minute meeting. Like, come on, I don't know anybody who's that disciplined. That's when I start working, you know, 10, 12 hour days and feeling like I got nothing done. So that's kind of what I found has worked for me. So in general for me, I have blocks on there of when I know I can put in when I'm the most productive, which is usually in the mornings. And the more intentional I am about blocking in that flow state work, the better. So I found that works for me. So my calendar is definitely not in these 15 minute increments. But I also think a lot of that's related to the role. Right, don't you? I mean, because you also sent over one of, one of your, you know, mutual friend, one of Your clients. He sent over his calendar and I'm looking at it right now and God dang. It's like something every 15 minutes. Yeah, like quick switching between a lot of things.

Yeah, he's got, he's got shorter things. I think that, like a lot of the stuff that we do is longer. So like, if, if there's a call that has to be done, that's like a regular call with a group of people that we've got, then I know that's going to be 60 to 90 minutes. That's not going to ever be 15 minutes. I do have meetings that are shorter. I try. Like, if it's a, hey, we need to talk about something to see where to go or something like that, then that's going to be a short call. But that switching on and switching off time, there's a lot of lost productivity with that. They've done study after study on that. So I think having good chunks of time that you're spending doing things is better. And so most of the, like, I'll have those kind of quick calls that, hey, we might do something, or can you hop on a call? I don't take a lot of those. I do most of that with asynchronous. So I mean, really, like, I'm very text heavy on that and I push back against meetings all the time. So people, I can't tell you how many people that even. That we work with. Right. That it'll be, let's hop on a call to do this. And I'm like, what do you need? Tell me here, because I can answer this at three in the morning if I'm, you know, if I want. Or in between breaks or while I'm doing something else. And we'll get this done a whole lot faster. And that's actually probably my biggest productivity hack is I fight like heck against having anybody get on my calendar in the first place. The only people I want on my calendar, the only things I want on my calendar are the things that I'm actually going to have some meaningful time with. And the other stuff I can handle and I don't need it on my calendar because it's just, I can deal with it within the extra time that I've got.

So what do you think? If somebody's got massive empty blocks on their calendar, do you think that that is a sign of productivity or. Not necessarily. Do you think it's a sign that they're not productive and not particularly organized? Right. Because they've got all these unplanned blocks on their calendar, or could it be a sign of, like, you know, massive and extreme, you know, success?

It depends on a lot of things. But my guess is if, if, if it's the average busy entrepreneur, that if they don't have anything on their calendar, then they're probably being ruled by whatever is coming up in the moment. And so they're not as intentional as they could be. They might get a ton of stuff done, but I think from an efficiency standpoint that, like I said, switch on, switch off time. There's always somebody that's in your office or in your ear on the phone or, you know, let's zoom or whatever if you don't have thumb something scheduled. And so I think that's the danger, is if you don't have those things scheduled, then the important things don't get done. Now, maybe they're using, you know, an Eisenhower matrix or something else to say, I'm, I'm going to get these things done. These are the urgent, important things that I must do now. And everything else is delegated or not done by somebody else or deferred. But without some sort of planning on your calendar, I think it's pretty hard for you to claim the time to get the things done that need to be done.

Yeah, I think if I'm being like, if I'm trying to be honest, my goal would be if I. If I'm not really just thinking about it. Right. I think my default would be that success looks like having a completely empty calendar. We have no obligations. Right. Like, I think that's that. That's what I would think. If somebody were to ask me, like, what would be your goal? It's like, no meetings, nothing on my calendar. I can just do whatever I want. But when I think about, okay, if I was talking to an entrepreneur, look, it's not like I'm retired, right? We work. And so I think that's totally fine if you're like, yeah, I'm retired. I'm not doing anything. But as an entrepreneur who's looking to grow, like, I'd still be like, yeah, I would love it if everything was just so handled that there was nothing on my calendar. But if I talk to an entrepreneur about a possible, you know, investment, you know, an acquisition, and maybe they were going to stay on and run it. If I was looking at their calendar and I saw that it was completely empty, and they said, oh, yeah, no, I just. I don't need to schedule anything. I don't believe in that. I would think this is probably A very disorganized and ineffective person who essentially lets the outside world dictate what they're going to do at any given moment in time. And so it's funny because what I think I want, if I flipped it, I likely wouldn't want that from somebody like me.

And my guess is you wouldn't like it if you had that. Because then I think you're right. There wouldn't be the structure if you had an empty calendar. Like, if you said you can't use your calendar, you can't use a calendar for the next 30 days, it would be horrible for. Because I wouldn't get connected with the right people because you are busy and I'm busy. Even for us to get time together, we have to kind of schedule it, right. I think it would be hard. I don't think I aspire to a empty calendar. I would, I would not feel successful if I had an empty calendar. Other than having an empty calendar as my success metric. I would feel like nervous about what I was missing getting done that I needed to schedule to get done.

Yeah.

Cause kind of the only way that it would work is if you literally had no inbound requests, Right. Like if nobody wanted to talk to you about anything.

Exactly. Which would be like, oh, man, what did I do wrong?

Am I out of business completely? Right. I mean, like, what. That if you're, if you're in it, right.

If you're in.

And we talk about the five exits of the entrepreneur, right? And exit number one being just kind of exiting the line, getting some help. Right. Exit number two, you know that, that's when you're actually, you know, kind of exiting management. You're, you're, you're a true CEO. And so at that point, you know, you've got managers, you've got leaders who have functional responsibilities. You're not like as much in the day to day, there's operating systems in place even at that level. Surely somebody's going to want to ask you, talk to you about some things.

I actually think role one, where you're the doer is the. Before you get that first exit from doing to delegating, that's the place where you're most likely to have the empty calendar, where you have the least responsibility. Because it's like, go to work at 9, leave at 5, you know, what do you do all day? Whatever they tell me to do.

Right. You tell me to drill sergeant.

Yeah, yeah. Whereas then you get to managing. You. You do have to organize people. And now you're delegating so even some sort of accountability check in with the people that you've delegated to. Now you're going to have to coordinate that and schedule that. Or if you just try to manage with no ability to coordinate those other people, even if you're the boss walking around, you can take them off of whatever they're doing. But you're going to forget people like you're not organized enough to know, oh, I forgot to check in with so and so about that thing that I delegated. Then when you get to the leadership, you're a leader, you've got to be coaching.

Right.

You're moving from that delegator, supervisor, accountability person to a coach. That's again, you know, and now as CEO, you're, you're liaising with your direct reports that are the heads of divisions and the people that are on the governance committee with the board and the shareholders. I mean, unless those guys have nothing scheduled, you've got, it's like, I don't know how you do it.

I think. Yeah. And the reason I say that you're.

Retired and it's golf nine to five or you're a worker bee and it's, you know, do whatever I'm told from nine to five.

Yeah. And that's where I think both extremes, because it was so funny, you know, I looked at hers and I threw up a little bit in my mouth because I cannot be, I cannot imagine being, having that, that much structure and being that regimen in 15 minute increments. But a lot of that's again, she's an operator, Right. And I'm not as much an in the trenches operator.

She's also an accountability person. She's got on, you know, talk with this company, talk with that company, talk with that company. A lot of those are check ins.

Yeah. And so I think it's understanding the type of work that you do. And so depending on the type of work that you do, your blocks would be maybe larger. But I would go so far as to say that if you're working right, whether you're working within a company, you know, an entrepreneur, entrepreneur, investor, if you're working right, working for a living, like we all are, I don't care how much you're making, none of us are just purely passive. Even if you're an investor, you're looking at deals, right. You're evaluating, you're working. I would say all of us should probably have calendars that are pretty much blocked out loosely, 9 to 5, loosely Monday through Friday. If somebody wants to say, I Don't want to work on Fridays. I think I can get it all done in four. Fine.

That's cool.

If you want to say I want to bust out at what, fine. But I think in general, being clear on this is when I work. This is when I do the work that I do in that time, whatever you decide that it is, you should be intentional about blocking out scheduling your calendar. And if you're not, then there's a good chance what you perceive as some kind of freedom is really, you're just going to be dictated to by some external force and terribly, terribly inefficient.

Okay.

Because it was. I was trying to decide. So I want to talk about this. I was trying to decide who's right. You know, is she right or is it the people that are responding with, like, you know, I run an even bigger company, and here's my calendar, and it's empty. I'm going to give the nod to her, but price something in between.

And I would say those are two extremes. So to me, it's the right place for you is wherever you fall. Although I think that empty is tough if you're actually getting things done. And, like, going back to what you were talking about with respect to transformative work, where I'm doing that, I also go through periods of being absolutely ravenous about learning some particular thing, and I'll consume constantly, and then I go through times where I just need a break. So I think if, like, if you're not able to do that and you need as a discipline to say, gosh, I never read books, therefore I need to schedule reading time twice a week between this and this time, then that makes sense. Or if you're so busy with kids and life and parents and family and work and everything else that comes with that, that you have to schedule that time, I think that makes sense, too. But otherwise, like, for me, I have also tried a lot of apps and things like that. Even that commit to three, which I thought was really super cool. And it just. It just takes too much time to do the app.

So I don't.

I don't want to do that. Right. So. So I've kind of got, at this point, when I have to coordinate with somebody else's schedule or if I for sure, like, there's a thing that has to be done and I got to get it done, then I'll schedule that time. I'll be like, okay, next five days, I got to get this done. So no meetings. But other than blocking time like that, all of these other Things from I'm going to work out to I'm going to read a book to I'm going to go spend time with my family. I'm going to make those things happen in the other time. The only thing I'm really concerned about is the, is the, that time in between those quote unquote work hours where I need to coordinate, as you said, with other people.

Yeah. I remember one time I was using it. I'm not going to name it because I don't want to. I'm sure it works for people. But I was, I was using a particular time management strategy, and I found that I had to block out time every day to execute this particular time management strategy. I was like, this is stupid. Right? This is really, really stupid. So, I mean, at the end of the day, kind of the 80, 20 that's worked for me is number one getting really, really clear on, like, what is, what is my flow state work today? Like, what's the work that I need to do that's gonna. I call like chocolate cake work. Right. Something that, because there's, there's chocolate cake work and there's cotton candy work. Like, you could, you could eat cotton candy almost into perpetuity because it basically is nothing. It's mostly air and there's chocolate cake. And you can love chocolate cake, but, like, you can only eat so much chocolate cake and you're full. Right. What is the chocolate cake work that your company literally cannot consume any more of that work? Like, it's, you can only give it so much and it can't metabolize it. Right. That's your genius work. That's your flow state work, whatever you.

Want to call it. I'm not sure that that chocolate cake then, is a good metaphor because there's no limit to the amount of chocolate cake that can be consumed and metabolized.

Man, I would love to watch you just eat chocolate cake endlessly and see what happens when your body disagrees with that statement.

That's my fantasy.

Yeah. But I do, I think getting clear on that, that's the first thing. And just knowing, okay, this is the category and if you can come up with if there's three things every week where you say, these are my big three, the biggest mistake that I ever made was I shifted from deciding these are my big three to just keeping, like you said, a running to do list of all the things. And I tried that this year. I tried that. I was like, I'm going to just see what happens. And it was horrible. I wound up getting everything done except for the most important things. If you can decide on Sunday what are the big three things I need to get done this week that'll make me feel confident. And if you really lay out time, I would just say the constraint I applied 20 hours a week. What are the big three things that I know would move the needle in 20 hours or less? I wouldn't allow it to be any more than that. Then what was left was kind of what was left and it forced me to prioritize. And so maybe that's helpful for people. But if I tried to do too much, if I over scheduled or if I said well, I'll get these things and we'll let the rest fall and I didn't do anything on my calendar, then I got dictated to instead. So don't become a slave to any particular system, but also don't see a lack of system as a as a win.

I like it. And if you guys have anything to share on that, we would love to hear your thoughts. What you found that works for you, what you agree with, what you don't agree with. If you like this episode, we would love for you to share this with your friends as well. Tell somebody else about Business Lunch podcast. You can reach us to give us feedback@businesslunchpodcast.com we'll call this the Calendar and Time Management episode. I like that.

Yeah.

Cool. All right, well thank you guys. We'll see you next time.

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