Time is emphasis: planning your calendar as a leader
👋Hi! I'm Molly. This is where I share the lessons I’ve learned from building fast-moving, messy, ambitious companies. For more from me, you can also find me on the WorkLife Podcast, on LinkedIn, and in Glue Club, a community for leaders who care about building great companies.
This piece is a companion to Mapping your company’s year, which talks about planning time efficiently as a company. A calendar skeleton helps you focus on your top priorities. Here’s a template – you’ll be able to copy it if you’re logged in to Google.
As an executive, everything flows from how you spend your time. You set a meeting, everyone rearranges their schedule. Time is emphasis, and your calendar very directly affects what gets done in the company and how you spend the dollars of the people who work for you.
Because I like being validated by smart people, here’s an HBR study that shows how important it is for senior operators to have clear priorities and calendar systems. The study analyzed the calendars of 27 CEOs, coding 60,000 hours. The study found that having explicit priorities and structure for your calendar and evaluating how you spend your time are some of the most important things you can do to end up spending the majority of your time on your strategic priorities.
When I work with leaders on time management, we start by clarifying priorities and then set up what I call a calendar skeleton. The skeleton is a template of a typical week that lays out time blocks for the core meetings and activities that happen on a regular basis. It’s the foundation for a living, breathing Google calendar, and it’s a way to get thoughtful about how activities flow into one another. It also makes time to handle chaos and unforeseen events so they don’t wipe out important work.
I’ll share some calendar template examples below, but it’s less about copying someone else’s system and more about HAVING a system in the first place. Map out how you want your weeks to flow, try it out, and revisit every 3-6 months.
The calendar skeleton
To create a calendar skeleton, I start with a blank slate (like this template) and drop in the most important recurring activities.
Here are two examples. This one’s for a business-focused CEO at a B2B SaaS company.
This is for a product-focused CEO.
Every leader has a different system. When I worked with him, Mark Zuckerberg used theme days.
