It All Comes Down to Your Calendar

If you are a Founder, your calendar is one of the most important things you need to take control of.

Your productivity, your successes and failures, how you delegate and manage teams, your company's growth… it all comes back to how you are managing your Founder Calendar.

One of the first things I do with every Founder I coach is loom through their calendar.

Their calendar holds the key to why they may be feeling overwhelmed or stressed. 

Or why they spend more time being reactive instead of being strategic. 

Ultimately, if my clients are not controlling their calendar, it means it’s controlling them.

So, what about you? Are you in control of your calendar or is it controlling you?

Do you find yourself constantly racing to things that are inbound?

Are you continuously bailing water from your “boat” to stay afloat?

Do you feel stretched to the limit, scattered, and overwhelmed?

If yes, it’s likely because your calendar is wearing the Conductor's Hat… not yourself.

This is normal for most Founders just starting their business. 

They are wearing many different hats, they have many different responsibilities, and they’re just doing whatever they can to keep the business moving down the track.

I call this the Handcart Mode.

When a Founder is in this mode they are desperately huffing and puffing as they manually crank their Business (handcart) to move down the railroad tracks.

This is normal for Founders in the early stages of their business.

You're learning and figuring out hundreds of things…

Who is the right customer?

What's the right product market fit?

What are the right situations and use cases? 

How are you going to actually reach your market? 

There are a lot of things that are being discovered.

But as the company starts getting some success, maybe growing a team or getting an initial round of funding… Founder’s quickly learn that their old way of operating no longer works.

The way they handled their calendar in the past is suddenly ineffective.

I know this from personal experience when I took my startup from idea to exit.

It's really easy to just keep your head down and grind.

It takes a moment of thought and a clarity to start stepping back and seeing the reason that you're overwhelmed is because the structure isn't there. 

The reason that you are reactive is because you haven't set up a system.

You may have the team there, but you haven't set up the ways to leverage the team and to structure the team. 

You may have thought you knew how to structure your time, but as the company grows it’s different than you thought and you’re left questioning, how should you really structure your time?

This should be easy, right? But, it’s not!

I struggled with the same questions.

But then I discovered the idea of Ruthless Simplicity, and began applying it to my own Founder Calendar.

What do I mean by Ruthless Simplicity?

I mean, it must be ruthlessly simple and extremely obvious what the Founder and their team should be spending time on and what they should be focusing on.

When you do that, everything changes.

Why?

Because, as the founder goes… so goes the company. 

If the Founder is scattered and all over the place, the company, business, and team will behave similarly.

It’s important to remember that there are several factors that influence your Ruthlessly Simple Founder Calendar, including…

• What stage your company is in
• What your Founder type is 
• Where you want to spend your time
• Where you can have the most impact
• What is going to move your business along the farthest in the fastest, and given the effort that you want to give to it.

I’ve worked with so many Founders on creating their ruthlessly simple calendars, that I’ve figured out how to break down the process in a specific, step-by-step, actionable system.

I’m sharing that system for the first time in my new course, The Ruthlessly Simple Founder Calendar. 

You can learn more about the new course (Starting February 15th), by clicking here.