The CEO Exercise + 19 Minutes Worth Your Time
Here’s a killer two-part exercise and an outstanding 19 minutes:
First:
The CEO Exercise
It’s worth however much time you spend on it — whether it’s just 2 minutes thinking or three hours plotting. Both will give value.
If you’re strapped for time, skip part 1. If you’re not…
Part 1: Audit
Get a big piece of paper and write out everything you do. This is tricky, so grab your calendar and look over everything you’ve got in there for the past month.
What have you spent time on?
There are likely five categories, but for our purposes, we can leave “work,” meaning your day job, as an unchangeable constant for now. Let’s focus on the time you spend away from work. These categories are:
Self-improvement / Health
Startup idea
Friends
Family
Start listing out everything you’ve done, along with a time estimate. So, maybe you spent an hour doing customer interviews last Monday — that gets logged under startup idea.
There shouldn’t be any judgement here — if you meant to spend more time on your startup but didn’t, don’t beat yourself up. Just recognize where you’re at right now. Just like customer interviews, we just want transparency into your current process so we can build a system to improve it.
Part 2: The Outside CEO
Now, create a goal for each of the four sections. Again, if you’re strapped for time, just focus on your startup. But it works well for each part of your life.
So, your startup goal might be: Figure out whether this idea has legs in the next four months (these work best if there’s an outcome and a time constraint).
Here’s the CEO part. Let’s pretend we hired a killer, experienced CEO to come in and take over your business. If they looked at how you spend your time and how that connects to your big goal, what would they say?
What would they remove first?
What would they add first?
Would they agree that your actions are lining up well with your stated priority?
The final step is building your next week how an experienced CEO who was being paid to make this succeed would build it.
I like this exercise because it forces you to have perspective - it’s difficult to step away from what you do and connect actions to results, but this works.
Second:
The best 19-minutes you’ll spend today
Watch this video. And, not coincidentally, it connects directly to the above exercise.
How do you make sure the things you do are supporting the goals you have?