You’re here because you need more time spent on your business (growing it), instead of in your business (maintaining it).
This is a short guide to help you find the time, allocate it, and protect it against the tornado of business and life.
“CEO Time” Versus “Maintenance Time”
The time you need to grow the business and keep it healthy is what I call CEO time. In CEO time your business moves forward. In all other times you keep the business running (maintenance). Shifting this ratio is the single biggest thing you can do to accelerate growth.
Why You’re Stuck Working In The Business
There is not enough CEO time for most business owners, because CEO time has enemies that completely strip it away. And they are stronger than we think.
Here are the big ones:
- Enemy #1: The Busy Week
- Enemy #2: The Wet Paper Bag
- Enemy #3: The 8-Day Week
- Enemy #4: The Catastrophe Trap
Let’s get to know each enemy and how to defeat it.
Enemy #1: The Busy Week
The busy week is the most common cause of a complete loss of CEO time.
Busy weeks are marked by fighting fires. Client fires. Staff fires. Family fires. Health fires. The time you needed to work on the business evaporates. Next week will be better. Next week will be more normal.
Yes we are delusional creatures.
The truth is that it’s the busy weeks that are normal. Steady predictable weeks are abnormal. Until we see this, we are destined to lose more weeks than we win. Our growth role collapses so often that it can slip off the agenda completely, marked as a lost cause. “It’s just not the right time” we might say and hope things change.
But we cannot wish this enemy away. We will fall ill when it’s inconvenient. A child will be home sick from school. A public holiday. An important proposal. It will always be like this. Our task here is to accept this is the nature of life, and realise that we need our CEO time to survive even in the busiest weeks, because we cannot afford to wait for the 1 in 8 weeks that are a bit slower.
Enemy #2: The Wet Paper Bag
One of the reasons your CEO role collapses so often is because it has the structure of a wet paper bag.
Why is it so weak? Because it’s the least formal role in your business.
Other roles have job descriptions, KPIs, set hours, deadlines, standards, performance reviews. But when it comes to your most important role we tend to go with the “I do whatever I feel like, when I feel like it, and some weeks if I’m busy with other roles, I don’t have to show up at all.”
This is why it’s the first to collapse. It’s your lowest priority role. Maybe not in your mind, but in your actions. If we looked at the data from the last 12 weeks your CEO may be the least reliable worker in your company!
PROJECT 1: Make your job a real job
TASKS: Give your role some standards.
- What are the hours (full time, part time, 4 hours per week, 2 hours per week)?
- When are you expected to be working (what days and times)?
- What are you expected to deliver each week (e.g. identify 1 growth hurdle or area of dysfunction and apply 1 fix per week)?
Now your role will stand a chance of surviving the urgent chaotic environment of business and life.
Enemy #3: The 8-Day Week
Your newly reserved CEO time will help, but if you still have 8 days of work to do in 5 days, it will be under constant pressure to collapse.
We can get 8 days of work down to 5 or less, but first we need to see what we’re dealing with.
PROJECT 2: Free up time
TASK: Define the problem
- List all the things you do, and how long they take (estimates are fine)
- If you have no idea, you may need to track your time for a week
- How many hours of work are you currently signed up for if you get everything done.
- What is your real budget of available time? Typically as a human being you only really have 3-4 days of real time when you take into account your non-work commitments to family, health, exercise, friends, hobbies, etc.
- How far over budget are you? This tells us how many hours we need to eliminate from your week to execute consistently and healthily.
TASK: Fix the problem
Once you can see where your time goes, and how many hours overbudget you are, you can start problem-solving to reduce it.
There are 3 ways to reduce your workload, as defined by the Eisenhower Matrix: Delegate (or automate), Delay, or Delete.
The steps for this project are in this guide: Win Back Your Time: Why Business Owners Need to Turn 8 Days into 4 (and How)
ENEMY #4: The Catastrophe Trap
Let’s recap:
- You have added structure to your role
- You have reduced your list of weekly jobs
But there’s one more enemy lurking. It’s the granddaddy of all traps. If you aren’t ready for it, it will make all of your other defences worthless.
Here’s the trick my clients often play on me (and themselves).
“I didn’t do my task for the week because we had to take my child to hospital on Tuesday so that wiped out my CEO time.”
It sounds so reasonable, right? After all, your kids ARE more important than your business. They SHOULD take top priority. But here’s the trick. You’re pitting two of your highest priorities against each other. If we look at a typical catastrophe week you took care of priority #1 (kids) but also priorities #4 (sales call), #8 (emails), and #9 (tidied up the office). There was room for both the catastrophe AND a bunch of lower-priority work tasks, but not the CEO role?
PROJECT 3: Build the three defences we need against this threat.
1) Blanks
CEO time should never disappear, only move. A week with no blank time for overflow is a fragile week. It can’t withstand change. It results in hard “this versus that” decisions.
2) Sacrificial Pawns
If a piece of software ran your business, it would need some instructions like: When a CEO session is unavoidably lost, it must be rescheduled in place of a lower priority role. That “sacrificial role” should then be delegated, delayed (rescheduled), or deleted.
The key to making chess-like sacrifices (give up a pawn to save our queen) is identifying our pawns ahead of time. We need to flag tasks to sacrifice when our CEO time comes under threat. If we don’t, our decision will be made by the people around us (your most needy employee, your most demanding client).
This allows us to pay a small cost (delay a sales call) to avoid paying the bigger cost of not growing by $500k this year. That’s what I call catastrophic.
3) Be Faster Than Disaster
If our child is in hospital all week, or our house is flooded all week and we lose all our work time, there is still one defence that can help.
The “do it early” defence. An important task left to Friday afternoon is at risk of anything that might happen during the week, whereas a task done Monday morning avoids much of that risk. There is a 10% risk of a derailment happening on Monday morning, and a 90% chance a Friday afternoon task will be impacted by something major earlier in the week.
If something is important, we put it in the least risky spot we can.
Turn this article into money
Complete the above tasks and projects, so that:
- Our CEO defence system works in busy weeks.
- Our role stronger because it has some basic standards.
- Our overall workload is reduced via delegation, delay, and deletion.
- Our goals survive our very worst weeks with blanks, sacrificial pawns, and low-risk scheduling.
The outcome is that our business moves forward every week, not every 3rd or 8th week. When we talk about working on the business instead of in it, we are really talking about shifting the balance between maintenance and growth.
Looking for guidance and accountability through this change? See the MG52 \\ 1-1 Measured Growth Coaching Program.