Around 10 years ago, my CEO quit his 9–5 job to create his own company. He had always wanted to build his own project, and after he identified a major pain point in the industry he was working in, he decided to finally take the leap, work for his vision and not somebody else’s.

He built his company from the ground up with a small team of employees and a bunch of investors. Together, they navigated the sea storm of entrepreneurship and eventually sold the company for $30 million in 2020. The acquisition made my CEO an instant multi-millionaire, but he won’t retire just yet. He’s keeping his position, and he’s not planning on going anywhere anytime soon.

My CEO only has 2 priorities in life: family and work, period. As time went on and the company grew bigger, it became harder and harder to balance his priorities, but he’s always managed to stay on track, consistent with his time management technique.

In this article, we’ll take a look at how my CEO effectively practices time-blocking as en entrepreneur/business owner while keeping his sanity (and his family).

What is time blocking?

Time blocking is a time management technique where a period of time is divided into smaller blocks of specific tasks. The most basic approach to time blocking is to slice up your days in 1-hour blocks and assign specific tasks to those blocks. Typically, you start by writing down a to-do list outside of your calendar, and then see how each item can fit in your week.

The key to a well-executed time-blocking technique is to move from one task to the other when your time is up, regardless of the progress you made on the task you were working on. You make progress overall by dedicating 100% of your focus to something specific in each block, and if you have to get back to a task another day, it’s completely fine.

Time blocking takes a while to get right, it really does. You’ll most likely fail a lot of times before finding a framework that’s manageable for you. My CEO has been practicing for years, and as much as readers noticed by looking at his calendar that he does indeed use time-blocking, it’s still not perfect. You’ll see there are still some block overlaps, and also some inconsistencies in “time-splitting patterns”. Let’s take a closer look at his approach.

The CEO template

For this whole section, the image I will refer to will be the screenshot at the beginning of this article.

Non-negotiable time-blocks

In 90% of cases, time blocking involves a very important component called non-negotiable time blocks. They usually comprise of the following:

• Daily events
• Habits/routines
• Things that are very high on your priority list in life in general (family, workout, hobby…)

One of the easiest way to start time-blocking your week is to put in those non-negotiable items first, and that’s exactly what my CEO does. Things like:

• Daily management checkin
• Working out
• Fetching the kids + time with family
• Lunch

These are imperatives, things that will almost always be part of his normal working weeks. They set the foundation for the week.

Colour-coding

On top of that, he uses event colour coding, another important part of time blocking.

• Green → Family
• Blue → Work
• Orange → Exercise
• Gray → Work and lunch

For everything, he puts in 1-hour grey placeholder events, where he can choose what to put and people can book him for meetings (we use Google Calendar at work).

On Wednesday, he has only one long gray box, because that’s his meeting-free, 100% focus day. It’s very challenging as a CEO to have a day in the week with absolutely zero meetings, and he will fail more often than not. But this approach at least regulates the flow for one day, because people can see in his Google Calendar that they should try to avoid booking him on that day.

Day themes

This is the last core element of my CEO’s time blocking template. He tries to theme his days of the week using always the same pattern:

• Monday → kickoff day. Weekly town hall, overview of the week…
• Tuesday → “free flow work”. He usually takes things as they come on Tuesdays and will accept random meetings if they pop up.
• Wednesday → no meetings, 100% focus. He tries and often fails, but at least it regulates the flow.
• Thursday → emails. My CEO does email all week long like everybody else, but he tries to allocate a big chunk of time specifically to this tedious task on Thursdays. You will also see this in the screenshot I shared in my previous article on his productivity tools.
• Friday → events + phone on the road. This day used to be filled with external events, but that was before Corona. He now uses most of this time attending events online.
• Weekend → in his own words, “Weekend=family, family, family”

Note: The purple theme tags at the top of the calendar are not present on the visual in the previous article about my CEO. I added the themes myself to this screenshot for explanatory purposes. The themes of my CEO days is something we at the company know simply from working with him.

The principles

I put together a list of 3 core principles I think are essential to the way my CEO (and the company in general) works with time blocking.

#1 Parkinson’s law

Especially in the corporate world, time can expand indefinitely. We tend to think there are stricter deadlines when working in an office, but more often than not, it’s an illusion. Things stall, deadlines get pushed, progress is very slow.

The point of the time blocking approach is to fight this bias. By allocating only X hours per day to tasks, my CEO tries to make sure he maximises his use of time, and to actually get things done. The whole company is based on a quarterly goals system. All in all, this is how my CEO pairs a long-term strategy (quarters) with short-term execution (time-blocked weeks):

Of course, there’s a lot of factors I’m omitting for clarity purposes here: external stakeholders, unexpected events, team performance, holidays… Efficient time management is one big complex equation, and it would take an entire book to cover. The point of this article is to present a soft introduction to it with a real-life example.

#2 Batching

Batching is often seen as a natural extension of time blocking. When you dedicate blocks of hours to specific tasks, it’s easier to batch similar tasks together. Things like:

• Emails & phone calls
• Meetings
• Organising & cleaning
• Writing memos & presentations

#3 Breaks

As much as getting things done is important as a CEO, making sure you stay grounded and in touch with your employees is too. As I’ve mentioned in the past, I’ve had coffee breaks and 1-on-1 lunches with him many times before.

My CEO is very approachable and overall available. His office door is almost always open, and he made a point to regularly communicate to the whole company on Slack and Email during the pandemic.

Whether you’re in charge of a company, a team, or just of yourself, having breaks is always important to make sure you stay motivated and efficient. We’re humans, not machines, and even the best time-management technique won’t turn you into a productivity robot.

As I’ve said before, my CEO works non stop, he’s an extreme type of guy. His only priorities in life are work and family, and whenever he stops doing one, it’s to switch to the other. Both can be exhausting. Always remember to sit back and relax once in a while, it’s important if you want to be able to keep going in the long run.

Have fun, and don’t forget to enjoy the journey.

Thanks a lot for reading! I interviewed 50 productivity/business experts and made a 150+ page guide out of the project. This is road-tested advice from real people who get things done. Get it for free here.