5 Ways Busy CEOs Maximize Their Time
No CEO ever complains that they have too much time on their hands.
Your job is to focus on just five things: Vision, Cash, Key Relationships, People, and Continuous Learning, but distractions inevitably come up. Ideally, you’d delegate them all, but there is likely too much to do and too little time.
“You could be the best time management professional in the world,” says CEO coach John Giegerich, “But if you don’t do some core things, you’re not going to accomplish all that is possible, or all that is possible for your team and for your company.”
The best leaders know they can’t do it all. Here’s how to help your team maximize their time (and yours, too):
1. Identify a Clear Vision for Yourself and Your Company
Start by identifying a clear vision for yourself and your company.
No, not the vision statement on your website. Your internal vision.
Setting a clear vision looks like this:
- Pick a timeframe: What do you want to accomplish three years from now? Five years from now? Pick a timeframe and look at your business and imagine what success looks like.
- Add the key component: Whether you’re hoping for a certain revenue, profit, number of locations, market penetration, or valuation, you can’t optimize your time without knowing exactly what you’re optimizing for.
- Define your target goal: Add metrics of success to your key component. You need a number—a realistic one, but one that still pushes you to think BIGGER.
Then, pull it all together and get specific. An example would be something like, “By 2028, we will be serving 60 million customers across five different countries with a full line of sports apparel for extreme athletes.”
2. Give Your Team Direction
Once you have a clear vision, you can start to look at the way you manage your time and how to do it more effectively.
But the one thing that many leaders miss? Bringing their teams fully into that vision. “I can’t underemphasize the importance of letting your team know your vision, because it gives them clarity, too,” says Giegerich. “You want to empower your team to help you achieve your vision.”
Giegerich recalls working with a fifth-generation family business that needed help resetting their strategy. After ten years of flat $1 billion revenue, they set a goal of going to $1.5 billion over the next five years. But they did it in under two—because they finally had clarity about where they wanted to go and what it would take to get there.
Leadership is bigger than management. What your team needs is clear expectations of how they can contribute to the vision and accountability for how they perform so they can get it done without you hovering over them. The more independent your employees are, the more you can get done.
3. Be Ruthless About Email
All of this sounds great until the next *ping* comes in on your computer or phone.
“Email can be an enormous time waste,” says CEO coach Greg Coticchia. “It’s interrupt-driven, so it takes away from your important work during the day.”
And it’s not just email—you’ve got your internal communication platform like Slack, comments on project management tasks or Salesforce leads, and all manner of apps that interrupt our focus while we’re trying to work.
Make sure you manage your asynchronous communication, instead of letting it manage you. Remove yourself from emails or Slack threads that can be handled by your team. And let them know that you don’t need to be cc’d on every email thread. If something needs your direct decision, then they can include you. Create filtering rules for incoming messages so that the important stuff makes it to your inbox and the other items can hang out until you’re ready to read them.
“Distance yourself from the noise and clutter of all of these communications as much as you can,” advises Coticchia. “I set up an appointment for myself to be on email twice a day, in the morning and in the evening. I don’t check my email outside of those times.”
Email, social media, and other apps are designed to be interruptive and addictive, so you have to take an active role in organizing them so you’re informed about what matters and can leave behind anything that’s not important.
4. Prioritize High Payoff Activities
That’s because a CEO shouldn’t be spending all of their time on email.
CEOs should focus on five things:
- Vision: Creating a clear path for the company to move forward on.
- Cash: Understanding every aspect of the company’s finances.
- People: Hiring the best team members for the right roles.
- Key Relationships: Facilitating internal and external relationships that help drive the business forward.
- Learning: Staying up-to-date on the industry and market so you can be one step ahead of the competition.
The only way you’re going to be able to focus on the activities that move the needle for your business is to stop doing the things that don’t. Everything else should be delegated. CEO Coaching International’s Stop-Start-Continue tool is a great place to start if you’re not sure how to organize your time.
“You need to stop doing anything that’s not high payoff or you won’t be able to focus,” says Giegerich. “Set a date, and find someone to delegate those activities to.”
5. Use AI as a Time-Saving Tool
Whether you have access to a real administrative assistant or not, artificial intelligence can help you save time throughout the day.
AI will only offer more productivity as the tools get more sophisticated (and integrated into more of your tech stack, as we’re already seeing with Tableau, HubSpot, Salesforce, and more.) Here are a few ways you can use it:
- AI transcription and note taking for phone calls
- Using ChatGPT to start drafts of social posts, reports, or presentations which you can then edit (it’s still not quite good enough to copy-paste)
- Ask AI to analyze a data set
- Automated planning and scheduling
“This current generation of artificial intelligence has practical, everyday tools to help make you more productive,” says Coticchia. “Spend some time taking a look at the different use cases and how you can get your tasks done more quickly with these new tools.”
Become a more efficient leader with CEO Coaching International
Becoming a better leader starts with identifying your blind spots. Hiring an executive coach can help you better identify which activities are worth delegating to your team — and which to leave behind. Whether it’s helping access your leadership skills or holding you accountable for your strategic vision, our coaches are here to help you make BIG happen. Connect with a CEO Coach for a complimentary coaching session >
About CEO Coaching International
CEO Coaching International works with CEOs and their leadership teams to achieve extraordinary results quarter after quarter, year after year. Known globally for its success in coaching growth-focused entrepreneurs to meaningful exits, CEO Coaching International has coached more than 1,000 CEOs and entrepreneurs in more than 60 countries and 45 industries. The coaches at CEO Coaching International are former CEOs, presidents, or executives who have made BIG happen. The firm’s coaches have led double-digit sales and profit growth in businesses ranging in size from startups to over $10 billion, and many are founders that have led their companies through successful eight, nine, and ten-figure exits. Companies working with CEO Coaching International for two years or more have experienced an average EBITDA CAGR of 53.5% during their time as a client, more than three times the U.S. average, and a revenue CAGR of 26.2%, nearly twice the U.S. average.
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