5 Secret time management tools of the world’s most successful CEOs

ILLUSTRATION: Ruth Macapagal

Everybody has the same amount of time available, 24 hours, seven days a week. As I stated many times before, the Fortune 500 CEOs and famous self-made dollar billionaire entrepreneurs I have had the fortune of interacting with, coaching, advising or consulting, do not have some magic superhuman gene that makes them stand out from the crowd. What they do have is a different way of approaching their work, the principles they apply to get things done and the beliefs and tools they have at their disposal. They think and do things differently from the rest of the world. I will share some of the time management tools with you that my clients have found very beneficial to get more work done in less time and become more balanced.

Secret No.1: Use time mapping

You are designing a template for you that presents an ideal week, from Monday to Sunday. You can do this on a sheet of paper, in Excel, Outlook, Google calendar or whatever tool you use. The goal is that you create an ideal week for yourself that includes a time slot for every single activity or area in your life that is important to you. Leave nothing out. If you want health and fitness to be a part of your life, they need to have a place in that week. For example, set Saturday 9:30 to 11 a.m. weekly tennis game.

Time with your kids? It goes into your time map. Date nights with your spouse? Same. The key to balancing the art of achievement (business success) with the art of fulfillment (happiness) is to reserve appropriate times for the different areas of your life that are important to you. There is no magical one-size-fits-all. You may not care much about family or time with friends at this point in your life. Physical fitness may not be a priority to you either. You decide.

Secret No.2: Embrace your biorhythm

This practice of “time mapping” or “time boxing” – laying out an ideal week, and then slotting meetings, and private and professional tasks into the appropriate slots—makes sure that you have time for all activities that matter to you to reach your goals. And it also ensures that you do these activities when they are most effective.

Are you a morning person? Then schedule your most challenging tasks in the morning so you eat that frog when you are at your best. Menial tasks that require little of your energy can then be done late afternoon, for example. A lot of successful entrepreneurs and CEOs I have advised need a certain block of “private thinking time” for themselves. Why? Because their role is to make the best strategic decisions. They know that one small hole can sink an entire ship. Most companies are just one or two major strategic decisions away from breakthrough success or monumental failure.

As a business leader, you need that block of uninterrupted, quiet thinking time to address the most strategic decisions in your business that only you can make. Block that time in your time map and treat it as sacred ground. Nothing interferes.

Keep asking yourself the question: How do I perform best? When do I perform best? Then use these answers to schedule the most important meetings during your high-performance times. Every world-class athlete knows the answers to these questions and so should you.

Secret No.3: Align your week with your ideal life

This practice of time mapping is intimately connected with the advice I give to my clients to write down what they want their ideal life to look like, 10, 15 or 20 years from now. Why? Because every ship needs a destination. Only if you define clearly what you want, in all areas of your life, you can properly design a time map that takes all these areas into account. Hope is not a strategy. You cannot expect to magically reach your ideal life in a few years if you do not work on it now, today, this week. This means: all the major areas that are important to you need to have a spot in your time map. Otherwise, they will not happen.

Secret No.4: Keep your minimum balance

Make sure you include items in your schedule that empower you to be balanced. Why? Because balance allows you to make the best strategic decisions. How many hours of sleep do you need? How many meals a day, what physical activities, meditation time, time out with friends or family? Define it. There is no right or wrong; the only thing that counts is what works for you.

My advice: do not go against the fundamental nature of who you are. Embrace it. All the greats do. Find out what works for you, then systematize it by creating a time map for you that uniquely suits your needs. Then do all you can to model every week you have to fit that time map. I have personal time maps for a regular work week, for vacation (this one has a lot of time allotted for family, for surfing and unscheduled blocks to go with the flow and let my mind go into a free drive), etc.

Secret No.5: Plan for the unexpected

You may ask, “But Tom, how can I fit every week into that perfect schedule? Unexpected things may happen.” Correct. The trick is to reserve time for these in your time map as well by planning buffers into your schedule. Plan for the unexpected.

Do not cheat yourself by thinking you will not need these buffers because nobody’s week goes exactly as planned. Either you drive your schedule or others will. I prefer the first. The higher you are up the corporate ladder, the more you get to control when, where and how you will spend your time and interact with others.

Famous examples

Most people find it challenging to run one company and make it successful. Let us look at some extreme examples of famous CEOs who ran two companies at the same time, most of them multibillion enterprises.

Carlos Ghosn was the first CEO who simultaneously ran Fortune 500 companies as chair and CEO of Renault, chair and CEO of Nissan and chair of Mitsubishi Motors. His magic method? Time mapping: he cut his week in half and dedicated half of his week to Renault and the other half to Nissan. Elon Musk has repeatedly said similar things about how he handles Tesla and SpaceX by dividing his time between the two.

Billionaire Jack Dorsey is cofounder and former CEO of Twitter, and developer of Square financial services platform. He begins each day with three to five miles of running. He takes the day off on Saturdays to go hiking and plans the upcoming week on Sunday.

When he ran two companies, he would assign themes for each day of the week.

• Monday: Management
• Tuesday: Product
• Wednesday: Marketing/communications and growth
• Thursday: Developers and partnerships
• Friday: Culture and recruiting

As he said, “There are interruptions all the time. But I can quickly deal with an interruption and know it’s Tuesday—I have product meetings and I need to focus on product stuff. It also sets a good cadence for the rest of the company.”

The 5 magic keys

1. Use time mapping.
2. Embrace your biorhythm.
3. Align your week with your ideal life.
4. Keep your minimum balance.
5. Plan for the unexpected.

Tom Oliver, a “global management guru” (Bloomberg), is the chair of The Tom Oliver Group, the trusted advisor and counselor to many of the world’s most influential family businesses, medium-sized enterprises, market leaders and global conglomerates. For more information and inquiries:
www.TomOliverGroup.com or email
[email protected].