I have nearly 40 CEO clients that have let me into the most intimate parts of their work life - their personal productivity workflows.
Primarily I’m here to help them with delegation - but lately our conversations have turned toward productivity.
Reality is, most founders are “winging-it” - you don’t have an intentional system that ensures that you’re working on the right thing and using your time wisely - despite having a staff, all the tools and in the case of our clients, a dedicated Assistant.
Before you buy the next productivity course online, or attempt to read one of the thousands of productivity books that you’ll never implement, let me share the 6 principles that drive 90% of the results for me and my clients.
We’ve all heard this: “Work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion”.
I’m here to remind you that it’s true. If you constrain your work-week to 40 hours, you’ll drop balls.
But I can almost guarantee they’ll be plastic, not glass.
A constrained work-week acts as a forcing function for productivity. Commit to it, tell your spouse, your friends, your co-workers. Then stick with the rest of the principles below to make it work.
No one needs to work more than 40 hours. I promise.
The hardest question every founder has to answer each day is, “what do I work on, today?”
This is why strategic planning is so important. You need to figure out how your “10 year vision” informs TODAY’s to-do list. Here’s how:
Set long-term direction for your business. Traction lays it out as follows - build a:
Set Quarterly Goals - Often called “OKRs” or “Rocks”. This narrows the 1-year plan into what needs to happen over the next 3 months.
Commit to Weekly Planning - Plan your “Weekly Big 3” (top 3 goals) based on your Quarterly Goals.
Commit to Daily Planning - Intentionally plan your “Daily Big 3” based on your “Weekly Big 3”.
Your calendar should reflect how you want to spend your time, not how other people schedule it for you.
I rebuild my ideal week every quarter. It includes deep work, meetings, workouts, reading, family time, and margin.
One non-negotiable: 15 hours of protected deep work per week.
If your mornings are open for meetings, you’re already losing.
Here’s a template we use and a video to walk you through it.
Remember: it’s ideal. Even if you stick with it 70% of the time, it’s a win.
These two routines eliminate most anxiety around work.
Shutdown routine: Close loops, choose tomorrow’s priorities, and get it out of your head.
Startup routine: Re-center, review the plan you already made, and ignore the noise.
This keeps you from being reactive - both at night and first thing in the morning.
Ideas, tasks, notes, random thoughts - everything goes into one place.
Not five. Not “I’ll remember it.”
For me, it’s two buckets:
You don’t decide when to do things when they show up. You just capture them and trust that you’ll process them later.
That trust is what gives you a clear mind.
I use Notion for this and have integrations in all my tools and device to make sure everything feeds into my “Notion Inbox”.
Imagine it’s 7 pm, you’re finishing dinner with the family and suddenly realize an important task you need to do.
If you have…
You can immediately shift gear back into being “present” trusting that your systems will take care of this thought later.
David Allen calls this, “mind like water”.
When you process inbox items - email, tasks, notes -ask one question:
What is this for and what’s the next action? Here’s a set of rules:
Decide once and move on. Open loops are energy leaks.
Most productivity problems are system problems.
And once founders put these basic disciplines in place, everything else - delegation, leverage, clarity - gets dramatically easier.
If you’re done working hard but still feeling scattered, this is where I’d start.