From Bottleneck to Breakthrough: Redesigning Your Schedule as CEO
IN A HURRY? HERE’S THE BOTTOM LINE
Too many business owners find themselves trapped in a business that runs their lives. But there’s a better way! There are four practical steps for redesigning your CEO schedule, starting with defining personal priorities, aligning CEO-level responsibilities, identifying opportunities for batching your work, and strategically blocking your calendar.
GOT A MINUTE? HERE ARE THE DETAILS TO CONSIDER
What is your ideal work week schedule?
When I ask busy business owners this question, they often laugh and say, “How about a week where I don’t have any fires to put out?”
In other words, do you even have time to think about your “ideal” work week? Are you running your business, or is your business running you?
When I first started as a virtual assistant, I grew my business to the point where I reached my own capacity. I replaced my corporate income, but then thought, “Now what? How do I keep growing?” I was delivering all the client work as well as all the backend parts of the business - sales, marketing, accounting, and everything else that goes into running a business behind the scenes.
Since I was the only one working in my business, work would stop whenever I was unavailable. If I took a vacation, or my daughter got sick, or had a day off school, there was no one to back me up in the business. I either had customers reaching out to me on my days off, or I came back to a boatload of work when I returned.
That’s not a business; that’s a job. Have you created a job for yourself? Do you really have the freedom and flexibility you’re looking for, so that you can enjoy life and actually unplug when you want to?
Signs Your Business is Running Your Life
Here’s how to tell if your business is running you, and not the other way around:
You’re a people pleaser, saying yes to things that could be to your detriment.
You’re constantly putting out fires and answering questions.
You have a team, but you’re the air traffic controller who has to keep all the balls in the air.
You don’t have enough team members, so you don’t have enough capacity to grow and scale.
You have a team, but they are maxed out or burned out.
See the problem? But if you can design your schedule proactively, you will not only be able to grow your business, but you will also experience better balance and happiness in your life.
The truth is simple: The way that you spend your time directly determines your results.
Evaluate What is NOT Working in Your Current Schedule
I’ve come a long way since launching my business solo in 2012. Today, I have a team of 25, but that also means I need to be even more strategic with how I spend my time. That’s a good lesson for you, too: Growing a team is not a one-and-done project!
Have you heard the phrase “new level, new devil”? As soon as you feel like you’ve done a round of delegation and have a better handle on your priorities and schedule, you reach a new level of growth and need to re-evaluate all over again! No matter where you're at in business, it’s a constant evolution.
Annual calendar audits are one of the best ways to reveal what is (and isn’t) working in your CEO schedule. I’ve written extensively on this process before, so I encourage you to read this article next, so you know how to conduct a calendar audit.
When I reviewed my schedule earlier this year, I realized I struggled with choppy days. My business coach pointed out that despite my effort to be accommodating with my availability to team members, clients, and potential clients, I was switching “on and off” all day long, without enough time to really get into deep project work. To fix this, I adjusted my calendar structure to include meeting days and non-meeting days.
Here’s another indicator that you aren’t optimizing your time: You often find yourself in reactive mode. All day long, you’re answering questions and solving problems. This distracts you from the bigger picture goals that you should be working on, in your business.
Of course, problems need to be solved, questions need to be answered, and meetings are going to pop up. We can’t be 100% proactive, but we can get better at it. The goal is to prioritize time working on your business rather than in the business.
How to Restructure Your Calendar for Success
When we talk about designing your ideal work week as a leader, there are four key steps:
Clarify Personal Priorities
First, focus on home, family, and personal priorities. As a business owner or executive director, there is always more to do, so it’s important to put priorities in order!
When do you want to start work in the morning, and when do you want to wrap up, each day? Many of my clients and team members have kids in school, so our days begin with school drop-off and end with school pick-up. Put these bookends around your workday, first. You can also consider hobbies and goals such as friendships, training for a marathon, or meeting with your book club.
Clarify CEO Priorities
Let's move over to CEO work. Top priorities can include strategy time, planning, visioning, and business development, including sales and strategic relationships / collaborations. These are the “big picture” factors that are going to drive the business forward. All of these “needle movers” go in your calendar, first.
Batch Your Work
The next step is to look for opportunities to batch your work. For example, I set aside Wednesdays to record my podcast episodes and work on marketing activities. I generally don't take external meetings on Wednesdays.
Batching your work allows your brain to focus, so you aren’t switching back and forth between multiple tasks. Other examples include batching your meeting days, networking days, financial review days, and more.
Block Your Calendar
The next step is to block your calendar for alignment and productivity based on the priorities you just identified. Start with your personal time, and then make sure you have open blocks of time for people to schedule meetings with you, especially if you use an online scheduler like Calendly or Acuity.
Then, block off the rest of your day with the work you intend to complete within that time. This includes your CEO priorities, your batched work, your standing meetings, and other responsibilities. For example, I like to block off the first and last hour of every workday for email triage, making sure my team is set for the day, and answering any questions that have come up. I also use this time to wrap up my day and prepare for the next workday.
Here’s another approach you could take to blocking your calendar: I have a client who doesn’t have the ability to block off large amounts of focus time during her week, because she's very client-facing, so instead she blocks off the last week of every month with no meetings. That’s her chance to prioritize her business without any interruptions.
Living in Survival Mode?
You didn’t start your company to become trapped in the whirlwind of daily operations. You started it to create something meaningful while having the freedom to live life on your own terms. At Melissa Swink & Co., we specialize in helping service-based businesses break free from operational quicksand and create systems that enable true scalability and growth.
Are you ready to transform your work week from chaos to clarity? Let’s have a conversation about how a professional virtual assisting team can help you reclaim your time and focus on what truly matters – growing your business and enjoying your life.