The Perfect Week: Time Blocking Tips for CEOs

0:00Is that because like the connecting with team members, if you have a team and you have a team

0:23Hey, everybody. Welcome to another episode of Business Lunch. I am here with Ryan Dice, who is an entrepreneur extraordinaire, founder of multiple amazing companies, and maybe one of the handsomest men that I know. Most handsomest, even. One of them. Yeah. Let's go to the double superlative. And, uh, and I am just Roland Frazier. So we are your humble hosts here on business lunch and looking forward to having a lunchtime like discussion with you, Ryan, you said you had some stuff you wanted to chat about what you got. I am always in, yeah, I do. I'm always in pursuit of, um, you know, just trying to try to have the perfect day, the perfect week, you know, just trying to figure out what are the things that I can do to be as efficient and effective with my time, trying new things, because I don't know, it's fun.

1:18What else are we going to do? Right. And so I've got a different like I've got a new time blocking methodology that I've been trying out a little bit. And I want to see what you think about it, because I want to know what I'm missing. If you got any ideas, suggestions, and just generally, you know, poke holes in it, throw rocks at it. Maybe the folks out there, you know, get value from it, and they want to try it out as well. But, you know, this is true. You know, this is what we do. This is lunch. We talk about the things that we've talked about over lunch and this is something that I'd talk about.

1:48So for those who do not know what time blocking is, why don't we do a quick review just so that everybody's on the same page? Yeah, great. Great point. Yeah. So time blocking is simply thinking about your week and just being intentional about your time and how you're going to break up the week and what theming the week and what activities you're going to perform at different points in time during that week. So blocking off different hours of different days in the week and claiming them for different actions and activities. Yeah. So specifically, I think the process is get your calendar out and say, I am going to meditate from 9am, to 10 a.m.

2:36every morning. I'm going to have a two hour block of time from 10 a.m. to 12, where I ideate and brainstorm. I'm going to work on my, I don't know, I'm going to work out, you know, from X to X, or I'm going to make outbound telephone calls from this time to this time, this many days a week. And it's going to be an appointment in my calendar that I am going to hold sacrosanct as much as if a whole group of people were counting on me to do that. And then in terms of kind of a little nuance to it, I think is that ideally you do the hard things first. Brian Tracy wrote a book called eat that frog, um, do the hard thing first and get it scheduled and get it out of the way.

3:20If you're going to, if you're an ice bath person and you're just getting into it for the first time, it's like, man, I'm looking at that water and I know it's really, really cold and uncomfortable. and I got to jump into it and I got to stay in it for X period of time, time block that stuff and get it out of the way early and have your comfort stuff later in the day. But that's just so you guys know, I just wanted to be sure everybody got the idea of it. Yeah. The simplest way to describe it is really budgeting. So if you think about you, but the way that you would budget your money, I love what John Maxwell said about budgeting.

3:53He said, budgeting is telling your money where to go. Time blocking is telling your time where to go. So it said budgeting is telling your money where to go instead of wondering where it went. Time blocking is telling your time where to go instead of wondering where it went. So it's the same basic idea. Now, I have over the years, I think, over time blocked as a founder, as a CEO, because I do believe that one of the signs and something that I look for, I know when we're talking to a meeting with our clients and portfolio company CEOs, I actually want to see a fair bit of white space on their calendar.

4:25I think when you're a CEO, if every hour of every day is blocked in, that's usually a sign that you're probably micromanaging, that you're probably doing too much of the work that your team should be doing. So I get very, very nervous when I see a CEO whose calendar is completely filled in and completely blocked. It's just a sign that you're doing too much of the work that your team should be doing. It's also a sign that you're not leaving room and capacity for serendipity, you know, for strategy. So I'm applying that same rule to me. So my time blocking strategy does leave a lot of open space.

5:00It leaves a lot of white space. Also, it leaves a lot of space for what I would consider to be the quote unquote work, like the real work, which when you're a CEO, very often it's just letting things come to you, right? It's an acknowledgement that I'm going to show up and my job is really to kind of deal But with whatever things come up on this particular week and time, that is always an aspect of the job. So for this particular time blocking strategy, it is definitely not going in and time blocking 40 to 50 hours of the entire week. So I just want to set that up for the thing. So the first thing, though, that I did want to do, I found that I wasn't giving any time to intentional strategy, to just thinking strategically about the business.

5:46like we were doing it we were doing strategic planning on a quarterly basis but i would go months without giving any real strategic thought to the business zooming out and everything was only thinking about okay what do i need to deal with today what's that thing and i was just getting very sort of frantic tantric and it was all just like you know and it had me in like this weird energy and i just felt like i wasn't all that effective just very very frantic so i've now set aside 90 minutes each week on my calendar focused exclusively on strategy. And I actually put this, originally I had this on Monday.

6:25I moved this to the end of the week. So now this is on Thursday. Has that said you can experience the week and not come from kind of a cold start? Bingo. I'm looking at performance, analyzing the trends, and it is just, there's no promised outcome. It's just the time where I can just sit there and just think, how did the week go? I'm looking at the company scorecards. How did it go? Do you have a process for that or is it just kind of general, let me marinate in strategy? It starts with reviewing the company scorecards because I want to see how is that going. Reviewing where we are in the context of the strategy that we've set.

7:08So what are the goals? What are the key initiatives? So what, how are we doing in the content, like in the progress that we're making? And then just what changes, if any, do we need to make towards that? And again, these are all questions that we were asking on a monthly basis as a team. I'm now just asking them every single week, just to myself. Now I very often, rarely will I, you know, take this and this does require some discipline because the tendency can be to now shift the strategy every single week. So if you're going to do this, and there's a time when I would have done that, you know, you don't want to come in like a wrecking ball and change.

7:45And if you're going to do this, you're not allowed to literally change the freaking strategy every week. Okay. That's the only caveat that I put in this, but I do think it's important to have some strategic evaluation time. So that's kind of the first little time block that I put in. And that is Thursday afternoons. Okay. You want me just to go through them all or you want to chat about each one individually. Let's go through them. Okay. Second thing, two hours that is only dedicated to connecting with key team members. I found I was no longer spending really any time meeting and connecting with the key members of the team for any type of mentorship, advising, anything.

8:27So you're talking about just like basic one-on-ones. Now, lots of people, they're probably doing this. I was doing a little bit of it. I wasn't doing enough of it. And so I thought if the people are important enough, two hours in a week, I think that's a good use of time. So that was the first one. So blocked off strategic time, blocked off people time. Let me ask a contextual question. Yep. Um, is that because like the connecting with team members, um, if you have a team and you're a CEO, that makes sense. If you are an investor and not, and you have a CEO that is supposed to be in charge of running the company, um, or even if you have a general manager, do you still see that?

9:18because it's a tough thing to think about, I think. Am I a coach to these people or is the leader who I've put in place to lead those people the coach and I'm supposed to coach that single person? I believe that everybody who is in any leadership type position should be mentoring somebody. And so whether - I don't dispute that. I'm just saying, should it be you? Like, are you the CEO of that company? So in this case, it's a combination where like for scalable, let's say. Yeah, I'm CEOing that company. So there's a couple of people I'm meeting with. Yeah, okay. So that would be the - I just want to clarify that because I think if you weren't CEO and you had a CEO, it might not be the best thing for you to be having those wonderful ones.

10:07Definitely, you should not be meeting with some other, you know, one of your CEO's leadership team. But what you should be doing is meeting with that CEO probably. Absolutely. Yeah. Yep. And so in this case, now we're meeting with the portfolio company CEOs. So yeah, absolutely. Yeah. I'm definitely not suggesting that you'd be doing one-on-ones, you know, skip level meetings as a part of this. And there is a place for skip level meetings, but that's probably not something to be time blocking into your meeting. And at NVIDIA and Tesla, they are doing that. Oh, yeah. I think there's a place for skip level meetings.

10:40I just don't think that I would time block it in on a weekly basis. Okay, fair enough. All right, go ahead. So we blocked off strategic time, people time. The third thing is focus time. This is something I've always had, but four hours each week for deep work focus time. And literally it's just two hours, two days a week. I found that that's about enough, oddly enough. And I get, I wind up getting. So I have blocked off and it just says focus time. And for me, it's on Tuesdays and it's on Wednesdays. I mean, what I get back to back days. This is time when I'm going to decide ahead of time what deep work I'm going to do.

11:22So I decide Sunday night that that is blocked off. So nobody can schedule a meeting with me there. My executive assistant can't put any time on my calendar. So it is blocked. And then the Sunday before I'm going to decide what I'm going to do during that time. So I do need to fill it in, but it's been blocked off. What are some examples of deep work? So it could be if I am working on a book, then I might do my writing in that time. So if it's creative work, then it could be certainly anything creative that's going to require me to absolutely just sit there and do that. If I'm working on any type of framework, if I am building, if I decide during the strategic time that I need to work on some major key strategic initiative or strategic plan, and I'm doing all the research around that.

12:14then I'm doing that. Memo writing, right? So if I want to put forth a memo because I feel like we should change the strategic direction of it, that type of thing would be there. So it is a lot of writing. It is a lot of creative. Whether it's internal messaging or external messaging, that's most of what goes in there. Nice. Okay. Anything else? And then the fourth thing is, and this was the one that I was completely missing recovery time, an afternoon each week just to kind of step away and recharge. I completely forgot about that. Not yet, not work. So it could be a walk, could be a hobby. Just trying to get some downtime in just to reset because the weekends for me are not, the weekends for me are family time.

13:02They are not restful. They're not, they're not renewal. Really? They're not. Like the weekends are when I effectively do a lot of busy time with my family, which is great. I love it, but it's not restful. It's your family job. It's your family. Yeah. It's, it's full-time dad job. Same with evenings. Right. And so I've just found that I, I, I need to actually carve out some time during the work day because that, that rest is a form of work. It's not that I'm not thinking during that time. I absolutely am. And so I can read during this time and I do, I can go through courses and trainings and I do like, it's fine, but I just, I need some time just to sit, just to sit back and be completely non, non-committed.

13:49So in terms of what I block off, if you do the math, you got four, basically four hours recovery time, you got four hours of focus block. So that's a total of eight. You got two hours of people. So that's 10 and you got 90 minutes of strategic time. If you round it up, you know, that's 11 and a half rounded up to 12. That still leaves a lot of open space in there that can get scheduled with meetings that can just be there for serendipity. But this is what I've been trying. And so far, it's been great in those two, by the way, in those two focus blocks, those four hour blocks. I essentially get all the work in that, um, that kind of the company needs and can consume, that it can really metabolize.

14:32Like it can't do a whole lot more than that. Yeah. And they say, isn't it that, um, most, most people, including CEOs only have about two hours a day of actual productive time. So yeah, I mean, it goes back to the, I bet in a given week, I only do like 15 minutes of real solid work, um, that office space. I think it's very true. Yeah. Uh, and I can like, what I can tell is when I don't schedule that, when I'm not intentional about what I'm going to do during those blocks, I don't do anything. I like wind up checking email. It just gets into busy work and it's completely useless, wasted time. And I feel it in the week.

15:17When I get to the end of the week, I can just feel it's not a very, you know, productive week at all. Yeah. I mean, I think if it's working for you, it sounds great. And I think that time blocking is a proven productivity increaser. For me, I have, because I'm older than you. Uh, I have, I have done time blocking and, um, I found it frustrating because there were so many things because I am an over achiever, over committer, overdoer of things. And I'm curious about everything, um, that very often there would be things that would happen that required me to vary on a very regular basis from what I had blocked.

16:13Like if I'm doing a specific time, like on Thursday afternoon between 2 PM and 4 PM. Um, so I, so, so for me, I, it's still, I think a form of time blocking, but it is variable time blocking. And, um, what I am doing is basically I have my list of things that I want to accomplish in a given week and in a given month. And that is a list that I revisit four times a year. Um, I have major revision, uh, you know, going into the new year and, you know, so let's call that goal setting and it's written and it's category by category. And then what I do is I'll say, I'm going to do this twice a week for an hour.

17:01I'm going to do this, you know, once a month for three hours, or I'm going to accomplish a thing. Like I'm going to read two books a month. Um, and it might be, I'm going to read two bunk, two books, two nonfiction books a month, um, and read can be consumed. So maybe I'll listen to them. Maybe I'll watch them. Maybe I'll, you know, actually read them. But, um, but I, I, I find that that helps me more because I am not as in control of my time as I would like to be because there are so many other people whose schedules have to be coordinated with mine. And that if I wasn't available and you're not talking about a ton of time, I think you said 11 hours a week.

17:43So, you know, 25 % effectively of your work week is spoken for. It's just that, um, the things that I do have that are regularly scheduled. Like if there's a, you know, a standing meeting that's on Wednesday, like I've got one on Wednesday from 10 to 12, or I'm doing a coaching call. That's a standing coaching call that, you know, hundreds of people are expecting, you know, us to be on. And it's going to be Tuesday from 9 AM to 10 30 AM. Those are the things that I try to keep those really, really, really to a minimum. And I think I've got three of them on my calendar. And other than that, all those other things, including recovery time, which I don't have it scheduled, but it has worked out that I wake up about four and I have between four and eight to kind of do whatever I want.

18:35And during that time, like yesterday, I wrote a book outline, a book brief that I sent to you, you know, it's, and I did the research and, you know, was just like all into it for that time. And I think from that, we can have a book that's that you and I are going to work on that's going to be amazing. And, um, so that's, that's kind of a, I guess I would call it variable time blocking that, that it's, it's much more, uh, task or goal-based, but it's not like an amorphous goal. It's like, I'm going to find, and I'm on it by looking at the schedule, even though it's not on the calendar. So I'm able to find the time I'm looking at my kind of my task list and I'm saying, oh crap, I haven't called my son and scheduled lunch up in Orange County.

19:24And I wanna do that at least once a month. I haven't done that. I gotta get on that. And then I'm gonna make that call and set that. Now that appointment is set, but he works a weird schedule because he works in an auto dealership. And so I don't know, he's never off the same days or times. So if I said, we're gonna have lunch every fourth Tuesday at noon, we'd miss probably 70 % of them. So I find that that's kind of an evolution of time blocking that has worked out for me. What do you think about that? Yeah, I love it. And I probably should have mentioned this. My rule with these time blocks is they can be moved, they can be expanded, and they can be multiplied.

20:03They just can't be deleted. So they're on there at a particular time that they usually happen. And so every Sunday when I do my planning, I can move them to a different time if something comes up. Yeah. Okay. They just, and if there's nothing scheduled, for example, because my focus block, let's say, is from 9 to 11 on Tuesday. Well, if I don't have anything from 11 to noon, I take that and I pull it down from 11 to noon. And so usually I wind up getting more focus time than four hours. If it's not filled, I can fill it with other stuff. And yeah, there are other times in there that are claimed.

20:39I mean, I've got basically three standing meetings, same as you. There's a standing leadership meeting that I still go to every week that I'm, I think I got probably three more quarters before I'm going to be fully out of. You and I do do this. We do a podcast, which hopefully never really stops. And I've got essentially a time that I don't consider to be focused time where I'm in studio, like recording some stuff that I just have as, as like a time that I got to be there. Um, those are kind of my only like standing times. I need to be there for the rest of these. Yeah. Move it, expand it, multiply it.

21:19Just don't delete it. That's the rule. I like it. Yeah. So maybe we call it a variable time blocking because it's, it's, it's basically an outline. Um, you have it, which is better than not having it so that it is, uh, it's kind of, you know, dot, dot, dot penciled in. And, um, and then it is subject to change, but you have a commitment to the block of time wherever it may fall in the week. Right. Yep. Actual time, actual day TV. I like it. I mean, it sounds like, sounds like we have very similar systems. Yeah. And so it doesn't seem like there's anything major that I missed because the biggies that I was missing before was the recovery time and the strategy time.

22:02Those are the ones that I add to them. Yes, I do think that there is potentially two things that are missing. One is what are you doing for your health specifically? That might go under recovery time, but I think like a commitment to something that gets you moving is a good thing. Even if it's, I'm gonna do a physical activity as opposed to I'm gonna play golf or I'm gonna play pickleball or I'm gonna do something like that. and professional development would be the other is like, what am I doing to advance myself and my knowledge outside of what I already know? The other two that you might think about would be mine's once a month is outreach.

22:48So basically I'm going to go through my contacts list and reach out to people that I haven't talked to in a while to reconnect just because it's so easy to lose friendships and partnerships and relationships if you don't do that. And then the other thing that I added as a result of wanting to be a more interesting person, because several years ago, my wife told me, she was like, she didn't want to go to some trip that was a business related trip. Maybe it was like the Mexico for one of our things or something like that. And I said, I said, but you get to go and we hang out and spend time with the kids come with this and there's beach.

23:29And she's like, it's all business. I'm like too smart to argue. No, it's not. There's 14 % of the time is business. And if I divide 14 % by the seven hours that I did this, then actually 92 % of the, you know, no, no, no, it's all business. If she says it's all business, it's all business. Her feeling is valid. Her feeling is her feeling. Right. So, um, so I, I started thinking about that and I was like, well, am I, am I just like an all-time business guy? Because I have lots of interests that aren't business. And that led me to think about like, well, I feel like that means I'm not interesting to her at that point because she's not interested in the thing that I am particularly focused on.

24:11So how can I be a more interesting person? I even Googled, how can I be a more interesting person? And I don't know if I talked with you about it. I know I talked with John Kronstadt about it. And then he got like on a kick of it too. And it's like, well, I have to be more diverse. And so what am I going to do that is completely outside my normal, uh, information consumption and activity. And, uh, and so now on my schedule blocked is that I'm going to do, uh, I'm going to learn about something that is not related to business that I just am curious about. And it's gotta be unrelated and different.

24:50And it's, I mentioned reading two nonfiction books, I've got to consume literature that is not, you know, the autobiography of Elon Musk and Warren Buffett's thoughts on this and how to scale your business that, you know, and the mergers and acquisitions quarterly. Those don't count. Those make me less interesting, more professional development, probably better sharpen the saw, but definitely not be a more interesting human being. And what I've found over the years that I've added those extra things is that the outreach to people has broadened my network. Um, and the, uh, focus on consuming non, non, uh, core non business things has caused me to find things that, uh, that evilly, you know, I can apply back to business or I can talk about them with people.

25:41So like, if I see something is on trend, uh, and everybody's reading, you know, I can't think of what it is now, but you know, the magical wonderfulness of tidying up. Oh, that sounds like a book that I would just fall asleep. Absolutely reading. And most books I think are terrible anyway, but I'm going to commit myself to a huge swath of the world has found this interesting. It's on trend. So I'll have lots of people who have also read it that I can talk with it about, and I can talk intelligently having read it. So I'm going to eat that frog and I'm going to schedule it and I'm going to listen to the dang thing.

26:18I did it this, this year was podcasts. Cause I, so many people listen to podcasts. Um, and I don't, I just don't, I don't know how you have the time like to listen to Joe Rogan for four hours, a podcast. And I don't know how many does a week, but, um, so I asked my wife, I said, what are you listening to that? I'm not. And she said, well, there's Julia, Julia Louise Dreyfus, the lady that played, uh, um, Elaine, Elaine and Stein and Seinfeld and Veep, uh, has a podcast where she interviews older women and it's called wiser than me. And she's interviews, you know, like Jane Fonda and Gloria Steinem and, uh, Nancy Pelosi, which is one I would never have listened to.

26:56Uh, and, um, and it's interesting because it's a, but it's, it's a very feminist, um, leaning left leaning, um, completely different perspective than I have interviewing people who are interesting to, uh, Dreyfus who is, you know, so, so I've learned a lot and my wife enjoys it. So now I can talk with her about it and it's given me new insights and perspective into all these people like Patti LaBelle. I, I was really hard. I skipped the Patti LaBelle episode for, you know, for the longest time, just because I'm like, you know, she, I, I know Patty's music and she's great and all that, but you know, and, um, but it was great.

27:44And so that, and then she and my son listened to a philosophy podcast called philosophize this. And I really would love, um, to know everything about philosophy, but unless I block it out and take the time to do it. So those are two podcasts in particular that I identified that I'm going to listen to an episode a week, um, this year. And that's, you know, so, so this is a very, very, very, very long answer to your question. I don't know if it helps those categories are things that, that I've found that have, I believe helped me to be more how I want to be. Yeah. I love, um, so I was for mine, this is specifically in the, what I'm talking about here is kind of in the nine to five, my quote unquote CEO, you know, time block kind of thing.