In this practical episode, Scott Ritzheimer, shares a simple exercise to reclaim control of your CEO schedule. If you struggle with endless pulls on your time and unclear priorities, you won’t want to miss it.
You will discover:
– What setting goals for top movers turns insights into actionable change
– How to rate current time use across key categories like planning and mentoring.
– Why envisioning your ideal schedule six months out reveals big shifts
Episode Transcript
Scott Ritzheimer
Hello, hello and welcome. Welcome once again to the start, scale and succeed. Podcast, the only podcast that grows with you through all seven stages of your journey as a founder. And today, we’re going to talk about an exercise that I use about this time of year, toward the end of the year, the beginning of the new year, with just about every one of my stage five CEOs that I work with. It’s a ridiculously simple exercise, but one that I have found is remarkably powerful. What does it do? It helps you to control your schedule. Now, don’t worry, we’re not going to look at timesheets or calendars or sit you in a bunch of meetings, but there’s this question of like, what as CEO, do I need to spend my time on? Because you’re you’re being pulled in 1000 different directions. And I remember a CEO coming to me, and he’s like, we have all of these opportunities. We have all of these ideas. The problem is knowing which one to work on. And that’s the same thing with your time. And so I want to walk you through this exercise. It’s gonna be a nice, short, sweet episode. And this is something that you can do by yourself. You can do it with your coach. You can do it with any of our scale architects. If you wanted someone to do it with you, they’d be happy to do so. And so here’s how it works. I’m going to list off a handful of different, what I’ll call categories, things, buckets, that you can put your time into. And what I want you to do is, I’m thinking through each one. You can jot the category down if you’d like, and you’ll need a pen and paper for this. So pause it if you’re doing it. If you’re driving, don’t, don’t use a pen and paper. Just check this episode out later. But you’re going to take this in. You’re just going to jot down each of these categories. We’re going to work through them one at a time, so you don’t have to list them all off. And then what I want you to do is I want you to think about how much time you spend in that category. It might be some of my clients like to do it in terms of hours. So they spend four hours in team meetings a week. Or they might like to do it in terms of a percentage, and so they might say they spend 20% of their time planning or working on the business. Either one doesn’t matter. Whichever one works best for you, it’s a lot easier if you use the same thing the whole way through. So don’t switch back and forth. That’s really the only rule. Now, as we’re going through these, what I want you to do is rate each one as I share the category with you. So I don’t want you to think of the whole thing and try and, like, put it all together.
Scott Ritzheimer
All I want you to do is just think of the gut instinct, what your very first response is, and then write that down. So here’s, here’s, we’re gonna do it. We’re gonna go through I’m gonna go through these quickly. You might have to pause between each one, but for folks who are just listening, we’re not going to pause for like five minutes on every one of these would be crazy. All right, here we go. So first category, this is kind of the obvious one. This really is where you want to move towards spending the lion’s share of your time, and this is planning or working on the business. So I want you to think right now about how much time do you spend on an average week, thinking about planning for working on your business or nonprofit, jot down either the number of hours or the percentage of your time, and then we’ll move on to the next category. All right, next. This next category is networking, or relationship building. This is high level networking, high level relationship building, very future oriented where you’re meeting with your top clients or your most impactful members. This is time spent intentionally getting out of the office and meeting with other folks in your industry or that can help your business or nonprofit So networking slash relationship building, go ahead and jot down about how much time you spend on average. Now with something like this, you might not do it every single week, and that’s why we want to average it out. And I found it’s usually helpful to think back over the last month or so. Doesn’t have to be rocket science, but just take that, average number of hours or percentage of your time that you spend, all right? That’s number two. So we have planning working on the business that was number one. Networking, relationship building. That was number two.
Scott Ritzheimer
The next one is actively marketing, or actively doing biz dev, where, like you’re writing the marketing copy or setting up the ads, or you’re out there doing business dev in some active capacity, maybe at trade shows or smiling and dialing, as some of you might. If you are in stage five, this is where we really want to be conscientious. Is one of the categories that you might still be hanging on to some of but if you’re doing it, it might be a great part of part two of this exercise. We’ll get to that in just a moment. So think about that might be good for part two, but for right now, all we want you to do is say, How much time do you spend in that area, actively marketing or doing business development. All right, next one. This is category four, and this is selling or closing deals. So where you are an act. Part of the sales process. Maybe you’ve still got a full book of business that you’re maintaining. Maybe you’re still the one who closes the big deals for the organization. Maybe you’ve just got one or two clients that you still work with closely. What percentage of your time or hours of an average week do you spend actively selling or closing deals. That’s category number four. Category number five is fulfillment or client delivery. So what do you want to think about here is, what are the parts of whatever it is that you do or sell or offer that you’re still responsible for? That might be the act of doing of it, it might be decision making of it, and more likely, it’s the active management of the people who are doing it. And so if you’re regularly reviewing processes or following up with team members handling issues when they come up, that might fit in another category we’ll talk about here in just a moment. But if you are either in or actively managing the fulfillment or client delivery that’s going to fall in this bucket. All right. Next category here is administration, and this is, you know, to be fair, it’s kind of the junk drawer of what executives work on. Sorry to all you really wonderful people who work in these areas, but there’s a whole lot of stuff that doesn’t actually fit together, but all really falls under this category of administration, things like finances and the bookkeeping and reviewing financial reports, things like HR and hiring and pay bands and all the crazy stuff that we have to pay attention to these days, things like it. If you’re still one of those kind of tech forward founders who’s like the main IT person for your company. That’s another high quality candidate for part two of this process. But again, how much time do you spend in these areas combined? So all the administrative stuff, like finances, HR, IT other systems and processes that you guys might have to keep up with.
Scott Ritzheimer
All right, that’s the next bucket. We’ve got a few more. We’re almost there. Next one, mentoring and coaching, and this is in particular one on one. So how much time are you intentionally spending with your direct team of executives, with your up and coming managers, and maybe one or two or five or 10 other people throughout your organization that you’re actively mentoring? This could be anything from one on one, same page meetings. It could be taking folks out to lunch just to hear how they’re doing. Might be spending time with a new hire when they come in. But any environment in which you are actively mentoring and coaching in a one on one circumstance. That’s the next bucket here. Three more. We’re almost there. Third to last is team meetings. And I’ll be honest, this one makes folks cry every once in a while when they really look at how much time they’re spending in meetings at this stage. And team meetings is really if it doesn’t fit into any of the previous categories. That’s why we’ve got it pretty late in the process here. So it’s not necessarily time that’s a meeting that’s specifically dedicated to working on the business, for example, that would go in the working on the business category at the beginning. But this is all the other team meetings that happen. So if you do some kind of a weekly leadership team meeting or monthly leadership team meeting that would go in here if you’re part of the Client Onboarding team, or there’s 1000s of meetings that we’re all in, all those meetings that you find yourself in all the time, whether they’re pre scheduled or not, those are team meetings. They’re going to go in this category. All right, two more.
Scott Ritzheimer
This one’s often overlooked, and it’s real hard for a lot of folks to think of on a weekly basis how much time they spend here. And to some extent, that’s okay, but it’s a really important category for CEOs, and that is training. You have an enormous amount of institutional knowledge in you singular. And if your training program exists without your active involvement, you might be missing out in a really big way. And so while you might not do it every single week, almost certainly won’t. You might want to allocate a little bit of time on average to your training if you aren’t already so for right now, all we’re doing is saying how much time you do spend there on average. We’ll talk about step two here in a moment before we get there the very last one, the dreaded one, and it is firefighting. Hopefully, if you’re in stage four, it’s nowhere near what it was back in stage I’m sorry. Hopefully if you’re in Stage Five, it’s nowhere near what it was in stage four, but it can sneak up on you, especially during busy seasons. And so if you are spending any material amount of time firefighting, you’re going to want to write that down here. If it’s an hour a week, 10% of your time, whatever that number is, that’s what you’re going to do. So if you missed any of those, go back and record them. I’m not going to say all of them. Again here just yet, because we’re going to listen one more time, you’ll see why. But what I want you to think about here, just as you’re looking at that, is one where are you spending your time? Did anything surprise you? Is anything strike you as no longer appropriate? Is anything too high or too small, anything that you’d like to change. Does any of that represent something that you really don’t like doing and you’re probably doing too much of it.
Scott Ritzheimer
Take some time to reflect on each and every one of these. And as you do, we’re going to start building out list number two here, or score number two. And so if you think of all those categories, all those buckets for your time. What I want you now to think about is on July 1, or whenever you’re listening to this, six months from now, six months is seems to be the right time. Three months some changes can happen, but not a whole lot. A year you’ll have forgotten that you did this exercise. But six months is about the right timeframe for a CEO to make meaningful changes to some of these numbers. So take a date six months from now and write it down. We’ll use July 1 for this recording. And now what I want you to think about is if you were to really give it a concerted effort, if you were to solve for some of the issues that are currently pushing you to spend more time doing stuff that you don’t want to do. If you were to think about what a CEO for a company or a nonprofit like yours should be doing and how they should be spending your time, what I want you to do is take all of that and think through for each of these how much time you’d like to be spending realistically on each of these categories in July or six months from now. So a couple of recommendations. Some of the things that I’ve seen as common patterns is that for the vast majority of my clients, they’re spending too little time in those first two categories, they’re not planning or working on the business. They’re not networking or building relationships, especially for the future. And that’s a big problem, because for CEOs, I would go so far as to say the majority of your time, at least 51% really should go into those two buckets, if you’re doing it right, if you’re stepping especially into that CVO role, that chief visionary officer role, which really is a great fit for founders, then you’ll be spending more and more of your time doing that. Now you can’t just add this exercise is real easy if you just create more hours out of nowhere. But the reality of it is, is you shouldn’t be solving problems by working more hours anymore. You should have learned that lesson, hopefully a long time ago. Sometimes it sneaks back up, doesn’t it? Instead, what we’ve got to think through is, well, if we’re really going to spend more time in those areas, where can we buy back our time in some other areas? And so for most folks that I’m working with in the stage five, CEO, chief visionary officer, stage they should not be spending a material amount of time selling or closing deals.
Scott Ritzheimer
They should not be spending a material amount of time doing fulfillment, client delivery or directly managing the people who do. They shouldn’t be spending a ton of time in finance. HR or it. You should have an executive team that handles that, or at least managers that can handle that as well. Where you should be investing your time is namely in planning, working on the business, like we said at the top, networking and relationship building, depending on your industry, that might be a bigger or smaller chunk, and then also in mentoring and coaching. Now there’s going to be a couple things that you know, realistically can’t get to zero, and so most of the time, we’d love to see firefighting go low, but realistically it’s probably going to sit somewhere around 5% of your time. We’d love to see team meetings disappear entirely. Sorry, that’s just not the nature of how you win as an executive. So we’re not going to see those disappear altogether. However, they don’t have to be 40 and 50% they don’t have to be a huge chunk of your time. So just to be clear, what is part two, the exercise? The Part Two the exercise to go through these same categories and list off how many hours or what percentage of your time you’d like to be spending in these areas by July 1. Now, there’s going to be a lot of them that are basically the same or the same, right, you might be spending, you might already be spending 5% of your time on firefighting, and you’re like, hey, that’s great. I just need to keep that there. That’s fine. Most of these will probably be pretty similar between now and July. In fact, you can’t really change all of them in that time timeframe, but what I found is you can make a really big change in two or three of them. And so as you’re looking through that, I want you to pick the two or three. Uh, different categories that were the biggest movers, maybe you’re spending way less time in team meetings, or maybe you’re spending way more time mentoring and coaching your team for the future. Take the two or three biggest movers, either up or down, and set a goal for each one. What is one thing that you can do to dramatically improve it.
Scott Ritzheimer
Now, for some of my clients, the goal is the move itself. I want to go from 15% of my time spent firefighting to 5% of my time spent firefighting. For others, it’s a little bit more result oriented. I want to develop great relationships with five new real estate agents, because we’re going to be moving in a few years, and I want to make sure we’ve got the right location. So either way is fine, but what you want to do is say what is a goal that’s going to help move you to that ideal schedule that you laid out for six months from now, July 1, and you’ll find, at least for most of my clients, they find a ton of clarity in that they’re actually doing a lot of things well. There’s a lot of things that are working great. They’re spending their time on a lot of the right things, but there’s also some room for improvement, and this is a great time to do it. This is a much more practical take on an episode. This is an actual exercise I use with my clients, and I wanted to share it with you because I’ve found that it’s super, super helpful, and it’s one that I hope translated over the podcast. So if this was helpful for you, fantastic. Again, I’m going to give you those categories one more time. These are categories that are especially helpful for those of you in stage five. If you’re in other stages, you will have to change these categories a little bit for that to be more relevant. But here they are. Category number one, planning, working on the business. Number two, networking, relationship building. Number three, marketing and biz dev. Number four, selling and closing deals. Number five, fulfillment and client delivery. Number six, administration, like financials, HR it. Number seven, mentoring and coaching. Number eight, team meetings. Number nine, training and number 10, firefighting. Hope that’s a helpful exercise for you. Let me know what you choose, what you find. If you want to send us your goals, let us know what they are. We’ll be rooting for you, and would love to see your progress as well. I hope this episode was helpful for you. I hope this exercise gave you some new insight into how you can better spend your time as a CEO, and I cannot wait to see you on our next episode. You know your time and attention mean the world to us. I hope this was as fun for you, as it was for me, I can’t wait to see you next time. Take care.
Contact Scott Ritzheimer
Scott helped start nearly 20,000 new businesses and nonprofits and with his business partner started led their multimillion-dollar business through an exceptional and extended growth phase (over 10 years of double-digit growth) all before he turned 35.He founded Scale Architects to help founders and CEOs identify and implement the one essential strategy they need right now to get them on the fast track to Predictable Success.
Want to learn more about Scott Ritzheimer’s work at Scale Architects? Check out his website at https://www.scalearchitects.com/