The Entrepreneurs for Impact Podcast: Transcripts
#142:
10 Ways to Create 10 New Hours Per Week (maybe)
PODCAST INTRODUCTION
Chris Wedding:
Howdy folks, it's Chris. As in, like, who else would it be? Anyway, hey, this was a topic that comes up all the time for me as I juggle various hats and roles, my own businesses, universities, et cetera, but really comes up for the 30-plus climate CEOs and investors that I work with in our Climate CEO peer group and Entrepreneurs for Impact.
00:33
So, I thought, well, what if I list out a framework super quick, nothing genius about this product here, but really to get ideas flowing, if you will. So, I walked through 13 slides, really just 10 ideas, obviously from the title, 10 ideas on ways that I found to manage time more efficiently, get more done. Again, I don't claim to be the best at this. I do think I've got a lot of practice at it.
PODCAST INTERVIEW
Chris Wedding:
Howdy, folks. It's Chris. I mean, look, who else would it be? Anyway, this is a topic that is really important to me as I juggle lots of roles, my own businesses, et cetera, or university work. But really, it's an important topic for the climate CEOs and investors that I work with in these peer groups through Entrepreneurs for Impact.
I don't claim that the 10 ideas I'm going to walk through in the next few minutes are rocket science or genius or no one's ever thought about before. But what I do hope happens is that somewhere in this rambling, that you get an idea to either dig further into one of these or do more research online, in books, et cetera, to understand ways to squeeze out, either getting more done at work, but just as important outside of work. Time to think, to be, friends, family, whatever, spiritual pursuits, exercise, et cetera. The thesis is, we all have more time than we think we do, but it is all too common to say, “Look, too busy, can't get to that.” All right, again, the disclaimer, not anything particularly new, but 10 verbs and a few bullets I'm going to walk through for practices that have helped me.
I'll also note, many of you who listen to this are way busier than me in lots of ways. Maybe your kids are younger, let's say. Ours are teens, basically. Maybe you've got lots of employees or investors, or a board, or who knows. All of these things certainly would make you busier than me. But the practice I have is wearing many hats and still managing usually, not every week, but usually averaging maybe 40 hours of work per week. Again, in parentheses, not always. There are spikes for sure.
Some of those hats that I wear or that I try to juggle to get everything done in a modest amount of time, I mentioned the Climate CEO peer group program at Entrepreneurs for Impact. So, we have four in-person events per year. We have three different cohorts of monthly theme-based calls that CEOs care about. We have guest speaker sessions, one-on-one sessions. We build different resources, investor lists, vendor lists, et cetera. I've got a weekly newsletter that I have the privilege to sit down every Friday morning to write, curate what I am learning and reading in the climate tech startups and investor space with a bunch of productivity and leadership stuff thrown in. I have this weekly podcast, which I just learned is now thanks to you all in the top 3% of podcasts globally, so big old thank you emoji and all that jazz.
03:20
At Duke and UNC, I've got six classes that I teach or co-teach across four departments plus one advisory board. I'm on the board of directors for three companies and one NGO. I still sleep eight hours per night. I've got 10 to 15 hours a week of meditation, reflection and exercise, and, oh, yeah, three kids where unlike when they were young, I was carving out all this time while they were awake, to be with them. Now, I carve out all this time and they're like, “Yeah, but my friends are way more important right now.” Good times. Look, clearly my amazing wife makes all that possible as well. So, those are the kinds of things I juggle on those average hours per week. Let's get into number one.
Number one is delegate. In parentheses, I wrote the word duh as in like, no shit, Sherlock. If you delegate your work from your plate to someone else's plate, you are more free. What could that mean? Depending on your role, maybe it's an executive assistant, maybe that's an in-person EA, maybe it's a virtual assistant, lots of great professionals out there, you can find them through places like Upwork as an example, maybe it's a step above an EA, maybe it's a chief of staff. So, more in the doing versus just managing your schedule, doing what's on your to-do list or hiring more C-suite folks to play a role.
Some perspectives on this topic of delegate, thinking about what the dollar value of your time is. Now, maybe if you're charging by the hour, that's somewhat easy, although that's not maybe perfect. The other perspective would be in talking to, again, CEOs in our peer group community, who are often series A through C stage venture-backed companies or very healthy post-revenue companies, what's the value of their time? 5,000 bucks an hour, 20,000, who knows? It's a very, very large number.
Another thought here is, just because you can do something doesn't mean you should do that thing. Look, you're probably great at lots of things. Certainly, if you're building a team, you were great at many things that got you to where you are, but just because you're great at it doesn't mean you should keep doing it. Third idea, again, we're still on point number one, delegate, is to take a look at the Eisenhower Matrix. You may know this from the Stephen Covey books. It's a two-by-two matrix where one axis is urgency and the other axis is importance and you can imagine how, say, one quadrant would be important but not urgent, and the other three are permutations of that. Having a look at that and allocating the items under to-do list, your calendar from, say, the last two weeks, you might learn that there are some tasks in certain buckets that deserve to be delegated. Okay, that's all for number one.
Number two, automate. One level down here, what are some repetitive tasks that machines, not humans, or systems that is not one-off decisions can handle? Now, obviously we're all thinking of two letters, A and I. I don't know, if you're running a company, should there be a chief AI officer? Or maybe it isn't a chief, but someone whose job is to think about, well, which of the many tools coming out in AI could make us better at what we do? A related idea is, what if you hired a chief automation officer? Again, someone who looked over the shoulder with permission folks doing their day-to-day job and asked the question, how could we automate this through things like software? That's point number two, automation.
07:37
Number three, batch, B-A-T-C-H. So, which is a better way to do similar types of work throughout the day? I've got a visual where you can imagine most people's calendar, where something similar, some similar activity occurs once every two hours across the day, or once an hour across most of the day, very chopped up. The other visual would be that all those similar things are done just in the morning across a two or three-hour block, or they're batched to be, say, two hours in the morning and three hours in the afternoon versus a zebra, a striped calendar, if you will.
By extrapolation, there's research, in this case, I found some through the American Psychological Association that says, “Even brief mental blocks created by shifting between tasks can cost as much as 40% of someone's productive time.” Now, that research may relate to multitasking, like the micro example of what I'm talking about here, but I think that that still holds true in lots of ways to how you organize your calendar, like a zebra or more in these larger blocks where similar work is being performed.
Number four, delete. So, differently, not everything on your calendar should be on your calendar going forward. There are two – Well, one is a thought exercise, the other is an audit of sorts. We maybe have heard of zero-based budgets, where you say, “Look, we're over budget.” Let's say our revenue is low. Let's go to a zero-based budget. For now, temporarily, everything is off the table and then we selectively add things back on, budget items, that we've now reconsidered to be essential in this new world where cash is even tighter. That's number one.
Number two would be more like an audit, to look back at your calendar from the last, call it two weeks, and color code it, at least two colors. One would be red which could either mean the meeting drained you, drained your energy, or you just didn't need to be there. It didn't add value, not your expertise, you were redundant because someone else there could do what you did. The other color would be green. It increased your energy, added lots of value, you provided perspective that no one else had and then take a look at those colors and how might that influence what you do for the coming weeks. Now, clearly, things are not black and white, maybe you have an orange color in there, but you get the idea. If you had to force it into one of two colors, which would they be?
Number five, partner. You can't, we can't, and shouldn't build everything for our businesses internally. 100% vertical integration is impossible. Again, duh, right? I think it's easy to hear that, but maybe sometimes not understand or agree that we're great, so why can't we do everything? Or there's opportunity, therefore, why shouldn't we capture all of that ourselves? A couple of thoughts here.
One is, we've heard the expression to go fast, maybe go alone, but to go further, you go together with others. So, in terms of let's say, impact or scale, perhaps that would encourage us to partner with outside organizations. Second here has to do with giving up, that's giving up control or equity or upside, let's say. How could you give up more in order to have more scale and impact? We've all felt this when starting companies for sure, whether it's co-founders, rewarding team members across the board with equity, or certainly with investment capital that we need to grow faster. Okay, halfway done and again, I will likely post a link to these slides in the notes here so you can take a look at this visually as well. Certainly, if you're driving, this is maybe a little useless.
Number six, reduce. Our verb is to reduce. It's easy for the default to be 60 minutes for a meeting, whether that's internal or whether that's external. I think externally that expectation is changing, but look, simple math, 30 minutes is less than 60 minutes. 15 minutes, I know, wait for it, it's even shorter. What I'm saying is to not be stuck in the inertia of how long a meeting can be because they fit neatly into our calendar, but to rethink what time is actually needed and to structure, let's say our Calendly invites or our automatic scheduling or guidance to our EA or VA to aim for shorter meetings.
So again, thought exercise, look back at the last couple of weeks, which meetings could have been shorter while accomplishing the same outcomes? And the second part here, is which calendar obligations could have moved from being a meeting to instead being a Slack conversation, a Teams’ conversation, look, well-structured, not a thousand tiny sentences back and forth, or memos instead of, again, taking 30 or 60 minutes out of your calendar?
13:42
Number seven. Number seven is time boxing, which maybe is my favorite and it relates to this concept called Parkinson's law, which states the time required to complete a task expands to fill the time allotted to the task. That sounds like it is incorrect English grammar, but it's not. If you allow two weeks for a project to be completed, it'll take two weeks. If you allow six months, it'll take six months. If you allow a week, it'll take a week. Now, you could argue the quality, the quantity of the work would be different, certainly in one week versus six months, but I am certain it would not be a linear relationship between time and quality, and quantity.
So, thought exercise, could you give yourself or your team more constraints around the time to complete a task? As an example, when I write the newsletter for Entrepreneurs for Impact on Substack and LinkedIn, each week I give myself two hours. Now, look, as I'm meeting with the CEOs in our peer group, one-on-one, or as a group, or having our in-person retreats, or as I'm going through and learning from many of you on LinkedIn or Slack, clearly, I'm taking in topics that are worth being processed into the newsletter throughout the week, but to write it, it's no more than two hours, often shorter.
Now, it could have taken longer for sure. But many of you have also told me a reason that you enjoy the newsletter is that it's two, maybe three minutes to read, clearly links if you want to go further, but it's not impenetrable. It's not too long that you need to skip it or scroll through all the good stuff. Short and sweet.
Number eight, go virtual. This sounds like a really bad idea, given that we've been way too virtual for many years and now the opposite is true, how can we go back in-person? I think we've all been invited or made the request, “Hey, look, let's grab lunch, let's grab coffee.” In-person to do that over food and beverage, wonderful way to build rapport for sure. It's also true that one of those coffees, one of those lunches can be hour and a half, two hours when you're driving, parking, subway, metro, whatever, plus the time to actually have the meeting and get back. So, may be counterintuitive, but can some of those in-person events move to a 15 to 30-minute Zoom conversation with a very specific agenda? Or even not, but 20, 30 minutes much shorter than again, 90 minutes for in-person. It's a combo, right? Mix them up. We got two more here.
Number nine is combine. So, instead of doing things in series, do them in parallel if they're not cognitively demanding. This is not multitasking around two types of activities, tasks that do require your brain to process complex-ish material. In contrast, what it really means is, can you combine things like two goals? I want to be fit and I want to have a great set of relationships, friends and family. All right, well, maybe you are taking a walk or a bike ride while talking with a family member in-person or on the phone. Now, obviously, riding a bike and talking on the phone less cool and doing that while walking, but certainly riding the bike with a friend can work. Or even at work, can you take more meetings or listen to a podcast or recorded meetings on whatever 1.5x speed while on a treadmill, let's say? I say a treadmill, which sounds very Luddite, or at least anachronistic, perhaps thinking back to when those were more common, but it's summer in North Carolina. Many of the CEOs I work with also are in very hot climates and I know that walking outside for a call when you're at work is definitely not cool, but not polite when coming back to the office and having certain aromas join you back in the office as well.
18:17
Number 10, rise up. No, this is not a call to action. This is literally rising up earlier in the morning. Again, not rocket science, but I would just know that the hours in the early morning, the things we do with the hours in the early morning, think, exercise, meditation, journaling, reading, et cetera, are not the same things that we typically do with the same number of hours if they are later at night. Often that might be shows we enjoy on Netflix, social media, et cetera. Now, I'm not trying to say everything on Netflix or Amazon Prime or social media is terrible, of course, plenty of good things there, but they're different, what happens late at night and early in the morning.
So, look, what if you went to bed early and got up 30 minutes earlier, an hour earlier even, what could you do in that new time? To be clear, I'm not saying work a whole lot more than you're currently working, but maybe it's the clarity, it's the mental fitness that you need to be more clear, to have more stamina while you are at work doing the important things that we do in climate tech and renewable energy.
All right, in summary, again, you'll see these through a link in the podcast summary, I'm going to go through the 10 really quick, here. Number one, delegate. Number two, automate. Number three, batch. Number four, delete. Five, partner. Six, reduce. Seven, time box. Eight, go virtual. Nine, combine and 10, rise up.
So, you see, not rocket science, but it is handy. At least I like it. They're mostly verbs, that time box throwing me off here. So, a framework for you to rethink what you do with your week and maybe you too can take one or two action items to combat the inertia of saying, “Look, too busy, can't get to it.” Clearly, we cannot do everything, but maybe rethinking what's important to you.
All right, that's all I got. Good luck and let me know how it goes on LinkedIn. Peace.
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We talk about #ClimateTech #Startups #VentureCapital #Productivity and #Leadership.
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Learn about our guests’ career paths, founder stories, business strategies, investment criteria, growth challenges, hard-earned wisdom, productivity habits, life hacks, favorite books, and lots more.
Who is the host?
Dr. Chris Wedding is a 4x founder, 4x Board member, climate CEO peer group leader and coach, Duke & UNC professor, ex-private equity investor, ex-investment banker, podcast host, newsletter author, occasional monk, Japanophile, ax throwing champ, father of three, and super humble guy (as evidenced by this long bio). 😃
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