Joel Miller:
It’s Tuesday morning. And like every Tuesday morning, you look at your to-do list. The sad news is you missed half of what you put on your Monday to-do list. “No worries,” you think. “Today’s pretty much clear? I’ll be fine. I can tackle everything I missed on Monday. I can get all my stuff done for Tuesday. And, I’m looking at the day, it’s clear. I bet you I can even get a little bit of Wednesday finished.” Now, let’s fast forward 27 minutes. And Frank has come by, and a call from Julie has just come in. And then there’s that email from the bank. What are they even talking about? And all of a sudden it’s noon, and all that Monday stuff, yeah, it’s still not done. And the Tuesday stuff, that’s pretty much hosed. And the Wednesday stuff, are you even kidding me? No, here’s the problem. This is Tuesday, and your whole week has already been torched.
And here’s the reality. It’s like that a lot, isn’t it? When we talk to business owners, we always hear that they don’t have enough time. And honestly, if you look at your own life, you probably think that a lot. Why is that? Because there’s always more tasks than there is time. And yet, time is the most essential resource you have to complete those tasks. But what if you could stop all of that crazy, and actually get control of your calendar? What if you could on that Tuesday morning actually already have a plan for Wednesday, and Thursday, and Friday that makes sense? That is manageable? What if you could prevent interruptions from sabotaging your calendar?
Hi, I’m Joel Miller, Chief Product Officer here at Full Focus, and today we are talking about the fundamental resource. You may think about money as a resource, or oil and gas as a resource, or plutonium as a resource, or people as a resource. And yes, all of those things are resources, and really, the economy needs all of it. But, more than any of those things, the economy needs time. You need time. And if there’s one thing that’s really pretty dang tricky to get a hold of, it’s time. Not anymore.
On today’s episode of the Business Accelerator Podcast, we are going to have a conversation first with Michael and Megan about how to stop sabotaging your calendar. They are going to cover some pretty recognizable ways that we are busy undermining ourselves on a daily and weekly basis. And then, on the bottom of the show, I’m going to talk with Courtney Baker about one tool that you can use that will help you get control of your calendar so that you can get your most important work done. Here’s an essential truth about time, it’s scarce. And since it is scarce, let’s jump right into this conversation with Michael and Megan. They’re covering three ways that you are probably sabotaging your calendar right now.

Michael Hyatt:
Time is really the ultimate resource. And if we waste time, we’re wasting the most valuable thing we’ve been given. Because you can get more money, you can get more resources, you can’t get more time. There’s only 168 hours in a week. And I don’t care if you’re the head of a country, or you’re homeless, you have the same amount of time. And I love this quote from my all-time favorite artist, David Crosby, who sadly died this year. And very young at the age of 81. Too young. But here’s what he said in a psalm that’s called Time is the Final Currency. He says, “Time is the final currency, not money, not power. The time will come when you will give anything for one more hour.”

Megan Hyatt Miller:
Wow.

Michael Hyatt:
And that could be at the end of your life. That could be at the end of the week, but the key is to make better use of the time we have, and to avoid these scheduling mistakes that we’re going to be talking about today.

Megan Hyatt Miller:
Well, and it reminds me of that verse in Psalms that says, “Teach us to number our days that we may apply our hearts to wisdom.” And I think that as business owners, we have all kinds of things vying for our time. There’s always more to do than there is time to do. And the consequence of our investment of our time can either be really positive or really negative. We can either squander what’s been given to us, or we can invest it for a really beautiful return. And there’s a lot at stake here, which I think is why this conversation is so important.

Michael Hyatt:
Well, here’s the thing that I want you all to notice. I gave a David Crosby quote. He is like the preeminent, rock and roller legend, myth. But Megan slaps down a Trump card, the Bible, which completely obliterates my David Crosby quote. Thank you, Megan.

Megan Hyatt Miller:
I feel like they just go together. You know? They’re both saying the same thing in different ways, right?

Michael Hyatt:
All right, what’s the first way that people sabotage their calendar?

Megan Hyatt Miller:
Well, the first way that you might be sabotaging your calendar is that you’re letting other people set your schedule. And I don’t mean literally. Hopefully not literally. You’re not giving people access to your calendar where they’re just putting in their own appointments. But if you stop and think about it for a second, your to-do list and your calendar ends up getting filled with other people’s priorities. When you think about your inbox, when you think about your text messages, your voicemails, your Slack messages, those are often things that end up in your calendar. And could be from customers, clients, colleagues, people that work for you, your family members.
Everybody wants your time, and if you’re not conscious, you end up playing firefighter. And without a very critical perspective, when somebody asks for a meeting with you, you just say yes. And you get it on your calendar, and then, what you find is there’s no time left for, as I have said myself at times, the real work. The things that you have to actually produce and do in order to keep your business going or to lay the track for the future, and your calendar’s just eaten up with everybody else’s priorities.

Michael Hyatt:
Well, if you take the Eisenhower Matrix that Stephen Covey made famous in I think Seven Habits, where he talked about this idea of urgency and importance. Rarely do people bring to you things that are urgent and important, or just important to you. It may be urgent to them, it may be important to them, but then suddenly your to-do list is getting populated with all this stuff, which is not that urgent to you, or not that important to you. So, you find yourself working on all these low leverage activities that shouldn’t be your first priority.

Megan Hyatt Miller:
Yeah. And it’s not that those things are not necessarily important, but what, for example, your direct reports or your clients and customers, don’t have the benefit of is the big picture. That’s part of what is in our purview as business owners, is being able to see the big picture, and then decide of all the important things on the list, what’s the most important? What’s the hierarchy and the sequencing that you need to work through those things? And what needs to be delegated to somebody else? We talked about that recently. But I think that it’s just really easy, because for that person coming to you, that is the most important priority that they have probably. But it’s your job as the steward of the whole organization to say, “That is important, but here’s where it fits. And I need to do these other things first because if I don’t, the consequence is more significant.” So, it is a more complex problem to solve for, so to speak.

Michael Hyatt:
And the antidote to this in our system or our way of thinking is something we call the Daily Big 3.

Megan Hyatt Miller:
Yes.

Michael Hyatt:
You’re not just going to take all these incoming requests, and just put those on your to-do list, so that you end up with 20 or 30 items that you need to complete by the end of the day. No, no, no, no. What you’re going to do instead, is you’ll consider those requests, but you’re going to populate your to-do list. I like to do it first thing in the morning. Some people like to do it last thing, the day before. Doesn’t matter. But the point is that you have an opportunity to pause, reflect, and weigh the relative value of all those tasks, and come up with the three that would be the most important for today. And you can have some of those others as what we would just refer to as other tasks, but they don’t rise to the level of the Daily Big 3.
And we encourage our clients that once you achieve the Daily Big 3, once you accomplish the Daily Big 3… And today, I’m one away from accomplishing that. Then, you declare victory. You’ve won, and you’ve got extra time. You could do those other things, but this is a way to keep other people’s priorities from taking over your calendar.

Megan Hyatt Miller:
Well, and one of the other tools that we have in the Full Focus Planner besides the daily pages, where you’re going to be identifying what are your Daily Big 3 is the weekly preview. And this is where you look back at the week that has just been completed, and answer some questions about the wins, and what went well, and what didn’t, and what you want to change. But it’s also, you do that so that you’re able to look ahead to the coming week, and answer the questions, what do I need to do this week to make progress on the goals that I’m focused on this quarter? And on Monday mornings… Were recording on a Monday today. I just had a meeting with my executive assistant this morning where Elizabeth and I are going through this process of saying, okay, the first thing we do is we look at my annual goals. And we talk about next actions and progress on those.
And then, I share with her what my Weekly Big 3 are. And those are the three objectives that I’m committed to accomplishing in this week. And then, after that, we go on to my calendar for the week and review the calendar. The reason that we do that in a very specific order is because the calendar is in service to the accomplishment of my goals, not the other way around.

Michael Hyatt:
Good.

Megan Hyatt Miller:
And we want to make sure, is there time allocated on the calendar for my Weekly Big 3 objectives? And is it very clear, the relationship between those objectives and my annual goals that I’m focused on for the quarter? And then, those are the things that get the priority. And then obviously, there’s all kinds of other stuff that goes around that. But I think that’s a helpful way to think about this because it can be easy to go bottom up. Or you look at the calendar first, and then if there’s any time left, then you’re going to put in time for things related to your goals. And we really want you to do it in reverse of that, and start with the most important things, and make sure that you get those big rocks, as Stephen Covey would’ve said, into your calendar before you try to put all the other things in.

Michael Hyatt:
The first of three ways that you’re probably sabotaging your calendar is you let other people set your schedule. The second way is that your meetings are random, not regular. In other words, there’s not any internal logic as to why you schedule certain meetings when you schedule schedule them. And a lot of people, the only criteria is, do I have availability? And one of the things that we teach our clients, one of the things I explicitly go into in Free To Focus, is this notion of the ideal week or the perfect week. It’s like, if you could control all the variables, and you could arrange your appointments, your tasks, all the things that you do in a week, if you could arrange those in a way that would be optimal for you, then what would be the way that you’d arrange them?
For example, I know that my most creative time is in the morning, not the afternoon. And I want to do my most creative tasks. I want to segregate those into those morning time slots, and do the administrative things that take frankly, less brain power and less creativity in the afternoons. But beyond that, like meetings, I love to batch those together so that… There was a time, for example, I’m not quite following this today, but where Mondays were my time for internal meetings back when I was the CEO. Before you, Megan, I’d meet with all my direct reports on that day, and then on Friday was my day for external meetings. If Joe Blow sent me an email and said, “Hey, can I get together for coffee with you? I’m going to be in town.” I would think to myself, “Well, if it’s on a Friday, that’s great. Otherwise, no.” So, I try to move it.
Now, it doesn’t mean you have to be that hard and set about it. But it does mean that if you can shoehorn those requests into those time slots that you’ve pre-allotted, then it’s going to optimize your week, and you’re going to be more effective, more efficient, have more energy. All the rest. So, just don’t populate your calendar with random appointments based on availability. It’s not enough of a criteria.

Megan Hyatt Miller:
Yeah. This can be where doing something, just having Calendly open on your calendar for people to schedule their own meetings, unless you’re using it with an ideal week kind of as the foundational driver of which slots you open up, can be really problematic. Because then, you’re just managing around those meetings and it’s like that kid’s book, The Pigeon is Driving the Bus. That Mo Willems book, it’s so funny. It’s like all of a sudden now you have a pigeon driving the bus, which is never a good thing. You want to be the person driving the bus, not the pigeon. And that’s what it can feel like on your calendar, it just becomes really chaotic. One of the things that’s very important is to create a cadence of meetings. If you think about what are the regular meetings that you need to have? What are the one-on-one meetings?
For example, every single week I have a meeting with my executive assistant, Elizabeth. Every single week I have a cashflow forecast meeting with our CFO, Rob. Every Monday, Dad, you and I have lunch together. Usually that’s on a Monday. And then, every two weeks, I meet with my direct reports in a one-on-one meeting. And then, I have group meetings that are like that. We have cross-functional teams within our organization that get together. Because if you just have an as-needed basis for meetings for all of your meetings, it just becomes chaos very quickly. And then, that’s when you get a lot of interruptions.
For example, if you have a scheduled one-on-one with your direct reports, then rather than them interrupting you throughout the week, they save all those things up. And when you sit down together on a Thursday afternoon or whatever your time is, then they can go through their whole list, and you are both able to focus, and really be productive differently than if every time a question came up, somebody called you or asked if you have 15 or 30 minutes, which breaks up your calendar, and feels really overwhelming pretty quickly.

Michael Hyatt:
That’s a key thing too. One of the things I like is to keep that creative time. The continuity of that is really important. For example, if I’m doing something creative in the morning, but it gets interrupted with just a 30-minute meeting. And Jim may have thought back in the old days when he first started working for me as my executive assistant, he might have thought, “Well, this is just a 30 minute meeting in the middle of his creative time, what could go wrong?” But the problem is it takes a lot of time and effort to get back into the flow. And once I explained that to him, then he was like, “Oh, okay.” That random meeting from his perspective, it’s only taking 30 minutes. How could that be a problem? But it’s a huge problem for those of us that have to do creative work. You got to arrange your calendar to accommodate your style of work, and what works for you. Because if you don’t do that, then other people are going to randomly set your priorities. They’re going to create a week that’s ideal for them, not for you.

Megan Hyatt Miller:
I think the thing you want to do here is ask yourself, what are the minimum viable version of the recurring meetings that you need to have that enable you to get the information you need to lead your team well, and for them to be empowered with the information they need to do their jobs well? And if you could start with those, and have those be set aspects of your calendar, you’ll find that you get interrupted a lot less, and you’ll find that you’re able to focus a lot more easily because you can count on blocks of time where no one’s going to be popping in.

Michael Hyatt:
Okay, three ways that you’re probably sabotaging your calendar. First way, you let other people set your schedule. Second way, your meetings are random, not regular. Third way, you’re working too many hours. And this is easy to do. We can convince ourselves that, okay, this is just a temporary season. But those seasons, unfortunately, those temporary seasons can bleed into another temporary season. And before long, you’re completely out of whack. Now, hopefully none of us are as out of whack as somebody like Elon Musk who just recently admitted he’s working 120 hours a week. I mentioned that on another podcast, but that’s just mind blowing. That’s 17 hours a day. Now, admittedly, self-reported, but we know lots of leaders who are working 50, 60, 70 hours a week. That’s not that uncommon.

Megan Hyatt Miller:
Well, statistically speaking, about 80% of business owners report that they’re working too much. I would say almost a hundred percent of the business owners who come to us, and ultimately join the Business Accelerator coaching program would say that. They’re putting in time at night. They’re putting time in on the weekends. Apparently 81% of business owners are putting in hours at night, and almost 90% are working on weekends. The problem is brute force gets to a place where the law of diminishing returns, kicks in. And ultimately, you end up with burnout, with exhaustion, with reduced creativity, reduced ability to innovate, reduced problem-solving ability, and decision-making ability. It’s interesting because Nevison has this rule of 50, which basically says, and this is by the way, a meta-analysis of several studies, that once you push past 50 hours of work in a week, there’s no gain for the extra hours. After 50 hours, there’s no gain for those extra hours. And then, another study found that 50 hours of work only produced 37 hours worth of return. That’s sobering.

Michael Hyatt:
That’s amazing. Well, there’s another study too from Daniel Levitin who notes that it takes two hours of overtime to equal one hour of regular work. And I’ve had the experience where I’ve been working on something in the evening, and I just cannot make any headway. I just feel like I’m grinding it out like an engine that’s running without any oil. And Gail, my wife, will say to me, “Honey, why don’t you just go to bed? Because you’re going to be able to do in the morning in a fracture to the time what you’re trying to do tonight, because you’re going to be more creative, more focused, you’ll have a good night sleep under your belt.” And she’s right. So much so that now, I refuse to work in the evenings. If I got a big project, it’s much better for me to get up in the morning early, and tackle it then.

Megan Hyatt Miller:
Yeah, me too. I’m exactly the same way. When I’m writing is really when I experience this, or if I have to analyze something. Just things that take a lot of brain power, and you’ve really got to be sharp for, it’s like I end up going over the same three lines in a spreadsheet over and over again. Or I rewrite the same two paragraphs, and I just can’t quite figure out the three points that I’m trying to make after that. Or something. Not for lack of trying hard, but you’re not getting any headway, and that’s that law of diminishing returns, which is why working too many hours is a huge sabotage to the calendar.

Michael Hyatt:
Well, and the best way to deal with this in my experience is with hard boundaries. Set a time that you’re going to quit at the end of the day, and force yourself to get your work done by that time, so you can walk away and feel good about it. Same thing with the weekends. If keeping the weekends free for family and personal pursuits is important to you, then set a hard boundary that you’re not going to work on the weekends, or you’re not going to work on vacations. But that’s the best way to control it. And that’s also how I know when I’m done. I think some people just keep expanding, and expanding, and expanding their workload as long as they’re waking hours, and they’re willing to even cut into their sleep if necessary, or cut into family time, or cut into time that’s self-care time. And that’s not healthy, and it’s not sustainable.
By putting a hard boundary on something, just like the type on a page, a hard boundary on where the margins is, protects the margin and makes the text more readable. In life, having margin, whether it’s time or finance, allows you to take a deep breath, and actually enjoy what you’re doing, and not fill all available time with work.

Megan Hyatt Miller:
One of the things that you can do here that we have in the Full Focus Planner is one of the daily rituals, is that you can put in place on a Friday afternoon if you’re trying to develop the habit of not working on the weekend. You could also use this on a daily basis, of course, to do the same thing, to not work at night. But if you can give yourself time for a workday shutdown ritual, where you put 20 or 30 minutes on the calendar at the end of the day, so that you have time to close up those open loops, and tie up the loose ends, then you’ll be able to transition to your personal life much more easily than if you keep thinking, “Oh, I got to not forget to send that email in the morning.” Or, “That person needed an answer from me.” If you’ll give yourself that time, in my experience, that’s one of the best ways to honor a hard stop, and to really shut off because your brain can relax knowing that you’ve tied up the loose ends.

Michael Hyatt:
Today, we’ve been talking about three ways you’re probably sabotaging your calendar and what you can do to fix it. The first way is you let other people set your schedule. And the antidote to that is the weekly and the Daily Big 3. The second way you’re probably sabotaging your calendar is your meetings are random, not regular, and we recommend it as an antidote for this, the ideal week. And then the third way you’re probably sabotaging your calendar is you’re working too many hours. And what we recommended here, and it could be part of the ideal week, but it’s to set hard boundaries.

Joel Miller:
At the beginning of the show, I mentioned that time is the ultimate resource. Michael mentioned it too, and he quoted David Crosby as saying that time is the final currency. And that got me thinking, do you remember when… Maybe you do, maybe you don’t. We were kids and we walked around with pocket change? We walked around with coins in our pockets? Do you remember when we had holes in our pockets and the money kept slipping out? That’s how a lot of our calendars operate. And if you want to hold on to the time that you have, you’re really going to want to listen to this next segment when I talk with Courtney Baker about the ideal week. We’ll cover that after the break.
Now it’s time for my conversation with Courtney Baker. Courtney is our Chief Revenue Officer here at Full Focus, and if there’s one thing I know she has, it’s a pretty full calendar. I wanted to talk with her not only in her role as our chief revenue officer, someone with a very full calendar, but also one of the voices on the focus on this podcast responsible for helping to enlighten the universe to the benefits of the Full Focus Planner. And one of the tools in the Full Focus Planner, one that we love and use, honestly with all of our clients, we recommend everybody use this tool, is the ideal week. Courtney’s a pro at this, and I thought, “Let’s have her on to chat about how a business owner can benefit from using an ideal week.” This is a tool that can help you get control of your calendar. Courtney Baker, thanks for being here.

Courtney Baker:
Yeah, thanks for having me. It’s always good to come over to the other side, see what’s happening over on the other side of the fence in the Business Accelerator world.

Joel Miller:
Peek over the podcast wall and see, exactly.

Courtney Baker:
Yes.

Joel Miller:
Well-

Courtney Baker:
I always think of y’all as the serious podcast, and it makes me feel maybe I’m leveling up a little bit.

Joel Miller:
Oh, I was actually thinking this could be a great opportunity for you, for that very reason.

Courtney Baker:
Okay, well, I will try to keep the laughter to a minimum, and the seriousness… I’m just kidding, guys. If you listen to Focus on this, you know that’s not going to be possible.

Joel Miller:
No. I say just come as you are. Just be you. Well, I wanted to have you on to chat about the ideal week. Just to give you a little framing here, Michael and Megan, on the top of the show have a conversation about basically, how to wreck your calendar. And then of course, conversely, how not to wreck your calendar. And one tool that’s incredibly helpful in maintaining a schedule that can help you stay productive like a foundation for productivity is the ideal week. And Michael talks about this in Free to Focus. It’s part of the Free to Focus course. It’s also, of course, baked into every one of the Full Focus planners that is out there in the universe right now. And a lot of people use this and love it. But for those that don’t know what it is or for those that are looking to optimize their use of it, I thought I’d have you come on and let’s chat about the ideal week.

Courtney Baker:
Yeah, I love this tool. It’s incredibly simple, and incredibly helpful. And it’s one of those tools that you’re certainly going to want to evaluate maybe quarterly. It’s not something that you do one time, but it does last for a while. And the first time that you do it, it’s really just a simple exercise of figuring out if everything went perfectly in a week, which hey, PS never happens. I don’t know. Joel, have you ever your actual week land, exactly how your ideal week is laid out?

Joel Miller:
Yeah, 2018. It was the first week of March. Yeah.

Courtney Baker:
Great work. Congratulations on that. And well, I say all of that to set the baseline understanding of what the tool is. The likelihood of you hitting this exactly is very low, but it doesn’t mean that the tool isn’t important. It’s incredibly important. So, if you had the perfect week, everything went exactly the way you had it in your head, what would that week be? And the ideal week is the exercise of actually getting that down in calendar form what that would look like. And-

Joel Miller:
Just to give a visual to the audience here, imagine the week view on your Google Calendar or whatever, but imagine that as prescheduled with time blocks for exactly the things that you want in your ideal week.

Courtney Baker:
Yeah, that’s exactly right. And when you go about setting this up for the first time, you may want to think through things that are existing meetings that you have, maybe ongoing meetings that you’re going to put as blocks. Things like, on my Tuesday afternoon, I have a block from 12 to 2:30 that’s always executive team meetings. And obviously, there are meetings like that, that it’s not so much my ideal week, but it is my ideal week because the person that employs me has said, “This needs to be your ideal week.” And you’re going to get those all on the calendar starting with those things that are already in place, and then, you’re able to fill in around those. We’ll probably talk in more detail what that actually looks like in practice.

Joel Miller:
Well, let’s just chat for a second about some of the benefits. One of them obviously, is predictability. If you know for instance, that every Tuesday afternoon you have a certain commitment, or every Friday, your day is going to look in a particular way, what that means is, it’s easier to schedule other things that need to be scheduled. You’re not going to run the risk of double booking things. If you do this right, you’re not going to time confetti your week with a bunch of meetings scattered all over the place. You’ll end up with something structured and intentional, sort of like a French garden.

Courtney Baker:
Yeah. For example, on Friday from 9:30 to 12, I have a block that’s just called “External Meetings.” And I know I’ve taken the decision making work out of, if I have an outside vendor, or somebody outside of our company that I need to meet with, I’m not just going to randomly give them times on my calendar. I’m going to go there first to that block. And again, it kind of takes the decision making work out of it. And I’m going to try to stack those, as many as I can get into that block before I go anywhere else.

Joel Miller:
What does that help you do?

Courtney Baker:
Well, I think for me, I’m in quite a few meetings. And what I really need in my week is some bigger blocks of time for me to do thinking work, and that’s hard to come by if you’re a leader in lots of meetings. If you’re not intentional about it, the space is there, but the space is probably 15 minutes here, 30 minutes here. Maybe even 45 minutes every once in a while. But it’s really hard to get into a flow, or get some big projects done.

Joel Miller:
Yeah, it’s impossible if we’re honest. You sit down and you have-

Courtney Baker:
Yes.

Joel Miller:
… some real thinking to do. You’ve got 30 minutes or an hour, that’s not quite enough time to actually execute on whatever it is you have in front of you.

Courtney Baker:
Yeah, exactly. I know that by being intentional and setting up my ideal week, and getting things batched together like external meetings. Even my one-on-one meetings where those are going to land in the week. When my team meetings are going to land in the week, it helps batch those together, so it frees up space for me to have deep work. That’s when I’m doing things like my Weekly Big 3. If you’re familiar with the Full Focus Planner or listen to the Focus on this podcast, we talk about this all the time. It also frees up a big block for just deep work. Again, things are never perfect or exactly like this, but as someone leading people, it really helps prioritize me getting some time to do really important work.

Joel Miller:
Well, just go back to that idea for a second of it not being perfect, or being able to hit it every time. You don’t do that flawlessly. But that’s not the point, right? It’s like it’s a standard that you get to call yourself to that helps give you structure as opposed to just a free for all.

Courtney Baker:
I talk about this all the time when I talk about the ideal week, which is if we don’t have any line in the sand, we’re absolutely never going to hit it, or get anywhere close to it, especially if you work with an executive assistant. That’s what’s so beautiful about this tool is you can give it to an executive assistant, and you’ve done the thinking for them. You’ve taken out the guesswork of when you would prefer things. And just like you, I had the example of taking the decision making out of it for yourself, you’ve also taken the decision work out of it for your assistant, and they know how to meet your expectations in a really simple, easy-to-follow tool.

Joel Miller:
All right, Courtney, let’s talk about your ideal week for a minute.

Courtney Baker:
Okay.

Joel Miller:
Tell us some of the buckets, the slots that you have filled, and how you have filled them in your week.

Courtney Baker:
For me, I have my morning blocks, my block to work out. I have a block for me to personally get ready. Then I have a block that is all about just time with my kiddos, getting them fed. I hate when people say kiddos, and I just did it.

Joel Miller:
I’m holding it against you, actually.

Courtney Baker:
I thought you were.

Joel Miller:
Yeah.

Courtney Baker:
Time with my girls, and then there’s a block for transporting them to school. There’s a whole hour where that has to happen. From there, I have every morning 30 minutes to do my workday startup, and at the end of the day, I have 30 minutes to do my workday shut down. I think those are incredibly important to my success, and so I have those blocked out in my ideal week. From there, I have big things like internal meetings, podcast recording blocks, executive team meeting blocks. On Wednesdays, for our company, we’ve set that aside as a meeting-free day. But I’ve given it a little more specificity in that in the morning, I want to prioritize my Weekly Big 3. If you use the Full Focus planner, you understand that terminology. In the afternoon, I have that set aside for just doing deep work. When I get out of work, I have an hour for transportation again. Those kids you took somewhere, you got to get them back. Okay.

Joel Miller:
What goes up must come down.

Courtney Baker:
Yeah, that’s right. I also have a block of time that is just for my kids’ bedtime, time spent with them, and then my own evening ritual. That’s a rough draft of what my ideal week looks like. I feel like there’s two ways to go about this, Joel, and you’re really the expert here. I feel like mine, as I’ve done it more, I’ve gotten more specific, but some people do it more broadly, where it’s just like this time is for meetings.

Joel Miller:
Well, I think what’s great about that point is that this could look different for anybody because this tool is designed to be customizable to you, and your particular needs. You may, for instance, not be able to segregate all of your external meetings on a Friday. Those may have to happen at the bottom of the day across the week, just depending on how many you have. Or in my case, for instance, I like to have my mornings free of meetings, so that I can do creative work and deep thinking work in the morning when that’s my sharpest, and that’s when I enjoy doing that work the most. I would much prefer to do meetings in the afternoon, and that’s how I have mine scheduled.
And then, you also said something I think that’s really valuable about the way a company can deploy the ideal week. Let’s say you’re the business owner, and you have an ideal week. Your ideal week ends up becoming kind of the prototype for everybody else’s in the business because they’re going to schedule their own stuff around yours. And you might have, for instance, as we do in our business all of Wednesday free of meetings for the whole company.

Courtney Baker:
I think that’s a really great point for business owners listening is once you’ve set yours, it helps inform everyone else’s. And for example, when Megan, our CEO, who’s my boss, when she sets our one-on-one, if she changes that time, I may need to re-look at my ideal week, but hers is going to help inform mine versus the other way around, obviously. And then that would trickle down, the people that report to me, when their one-on-ones with me, or when their team meetings are going to be. And you can even at a corporate level, start to group, hey, everybody’s one-on-ones, are typically going to happen on Thursdays. All of our internal team meetings, they’re going to happen on Monday. And you can do this at a company view and roll out, which I think is a really helpful first step for a business owner.

Joel Miller:
Well, one great thing about that, of course, is the benefits that accrue to you as the individual, then begin accruing to the whole team. Because instead of everyone having this scattershot random calendar, everyone is trying to conform their schedule to a more general framework, and that framework gives some structure, and some predictability to the time that we’re using to plan.

Courtney Baker:
This isn’t really part of the ideal week, but I feel like I would be amiss not to mention it. For anybody out there that’s a business owner that finds, yeah, our meetings are just all over the place. Everybody’s just got all these little pockets. They’ve got 30 minutes here, 15 minutes there, and all that time gets sucked up because somebody runs into you at the coffee machine. And that’s great. Obviously, you don’t want to forego all relationships, but having a day you’ve said company-wide, “We’re going to strive for this day to be meeting free,” I would say, and Joel certainly chime in here, was one of the best decisions we made-

Joel Miller:
A hundred percent.

Courtney Baker:
… for Full Focus. The yield that has produced, obviously, we can never measure, but has just been massive for our company.

Joel Miller:
Well, I just think about my own productivity and I’ve got, in some cases, large amounts of text to read. In some cases, I have large amounts of text to write. In other cases, I have a lot of conceptual work that has to be done, and there’s nothing harder than doing conceptual work when you get 30 minutes here, or an hour there, but it’s interrupted by an hour and a half meeting, or a 30 minute meeting. Sometimes even worse. Because you think, well, that’s not that big of an interruption, but it takes your head completely out of the space that it was. It reorients all your thinking. You come back to it again, and you have to ramp up all over again. If you get like four, five, six hours straight on something, it can be absolutely liberating and wildly productive.

Courtney Baker:
I would also hypothesize that people end up feeling more fulfilled in their work because they’re able to have time on their most important priorities. That they’re not just being reactive. That they’re able to switch gears, and be proactive, and leave the week feeling like, oh, wow, I’m so excited about these things that I was able to move forward.

Joel Miller:
Well, another part of that I think that you’re hinting at that’s really valuable to keep in mind is, the ideal week enables you to have a sense of control over your own time. And having a sense of control over your own time, is one of the key things that keeps you from feeling like, I just can’t get ahead. I just can’t find the time to do X, Y, or Z. Instead, because you have that sense, almost of peace, certainly of confidence and clarity around your calendar, you will be able to plan better, execute better. Just go down the list of things that you need to do in order to be productive, you’re going to have the ability to do that. In large measure just because you have a sense of how much time you actually have, and you’ve set it aside, and you’ve communicated to people around you, “Hey, this is what I’m doing with my calendar.”

Courtney Baker:
I think we’ve hinted on this as we’ve had this discussion, but it’s really important once you’ve set your ideal week to share it with people. Specifically people that report to you, but even maybe the person that you report to. Especially if you find, for example, if your supervisor moves your one-on-one meeting all the time, it might be helpful to just share like, “Hey, this is my ideal week. It’s something I’m trying to really help me get blocks of time for my most important work.” You can sell it however you want to. But it basically helps inform them, oh wow, they’ve really got a strategy for how to be the most efficient with their week. For the people that report to you, it’s helpful for them to know and have awareness so that they can also help you actually achieve your ideal week. I think the more open you are, the more that you communicate this ideal week, the more likely that people around you are going to help support you actually getting as close as possible to that.

Joel Miller:
Courtney Baker, thank you so much for being here.

Courtney Baker:
Thanks Joel. Thanks for having me.

Joel Miller:
That’s it for another episode of the Business Accelerator podcast. Now, before I let you go, you know that expression, you got to spend money to make money? Well, it’s true with time also. And I know this may sound paradoxical, but if you would like to have more time for the things that matter most in your life, I’m talking about work-life balance. I’m talking about the ability to scale your business so that you can step away from time to time, then you should go to businessaccelerator.com/coach and schedule a free and brief call with one of our business consultants. That little investment of time can pay massive dividends in your business. Because in the Business Accelerator Coaching program, we help busy but growth-minded small business owners just like you, scale yourself and your business, so you can win at work and succeed at life. It’s what we call the Double Win. And if you’d like to experience that for yourself, set aside just a little time, and go to businessaccelerator.com/coach. That’s it. We’ll be back next week with more conversations to help you accelerate your business.