Episode Summary

Are you running your business, or is it running you? In this episode of the Make Space for More podcast, Melissa Swink discusses the importance of designing a CEO schedule that aligns with your personal and professional priorities!

Tune in to learn strategies for creating an ideal work week, including batching tasks for efficiency and blocking time for focused work. You’ll learn how to set up your calendar in a way that supports both business growth and personal well-being.

Key Highlights:

• You can design your ideal workweek by:
• Prioritizing personal and family time first
• Batching similar tasks for efficiency
• Blocking dedicated time for focused work
• Limiting meeting commitments 
• Build a business that can operate without your constant presence 
• Regularly evaluate and adjust your schedule to support sustainable growth.

About Melissa:

Melissa Swink, Founder & CEO of Melissa Swink & Co., has a team of virtual assistants who provide administrative and marketing support for small businesses and non-profits.

Since 2012, Melissa and her team have helped more than 100 businesses grow through the services they offer, and she is dedicated to helping entrepreneurs create profitable, scalable businesses they love.

Her work is all about doing what works (and eliminating what doesn’t) and driving real, measurable results. Visit www.melissaswink.com to learn more! 

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Hi everyone. Welcome to the Make Space for More podcast where we talk strategies for growing and scaling your business in a way that's authentic and aligned for you. I'm your host, Melissa Swink, and in today's episode, we're going to talk about the CEO schedule, how to design your ideal work week, not someone else's ideal work week, yours. But before we dive into how we can help you do that, I want to ask you a question. Are you running your business?

Or is your business running you? Just think about that for a moment. I know when I started my business and started working as a virtual assistant, I grew my business to the point where I reached my own capacity. So what that looked like for me was starting out and gaining clients and taking on projects. And that was fantastic. And I had gotten to a point where I had replaced my income from my corporate job.

which I think is the initial goal of many business owners who leave corporate and start their own gig. But then once I got to that point, it was kind of like, now what? How do I keep growing? Because at the end of the day, I was working very closely with my clients. We had a great relationship. I still have a great relationship with my clients today. But what that often looked like was I was the one doing all the things in my business.

serving my clients and doing the work that they were delegating to me was of course number one. But that also meant that I was the only one doing the backend of the business, the sales, the marketing, the accounting, the billing, all the things that go into the behind the scenes running the business. And because I was the only one working in my business, work stopped whenever I was unavailable. And so,

What that could look like is if I went on vacation or if my daughter got sick or there was no school and there was no one there to back me up in the business and I needed to take some time off, work stopped. So I either had situations where I couldn't fully take off, where I had customers reaching out to me on my off days and asking questions or needing help with things or

I would be able to take that time off and then come back to a boatload of work that would take me a significant amount of time to work through and get caught up. And so with that in mind, think about have you created a job for yourself? Do you have the freedom and flexibility that you're looking for in your business so that you can also enjoy life and be able to unplug when you want to? So a few key things to think about when you're determining is my business actually running me?

This can also look like people pleasing, right? Where we're saying yes to things that can sometimes be to our detriment, or maybe we're constantly putting out fires and answering questions. So even if you're not working solo and you have a full team and you're frequently directing traffic, if you will, you become air traffic controller where you've got all these questions and communications coming in or problems that need to be solved and you're the one doing those. Or maybe this also looks like

you not having adequate help where the business has grown and now you need to seriously take a look at how can I increase my capacity and also be able to get the support that I need? Does it look like hiring another person for your team? Maybe your current team is on the verge of being maxed out. You need to start looking at who do we need to bring in in order to continue to increase our capacity for growth.

Those are a couple of indicators that your business might actually be running you. Because at the end of the day, what I want you to think about is how important it is for you to have a handle on your time. If you are able to proactively design your schedule, that is an absolute must, not only for growth, but also for your own happiness because that matters as well. And the truth is the way that you spend your time directly determines your results. So

As I was looking at recently the way that I'm spending my time, it caused me to revisit my schedule and the way that my calendar is structured. And here's a few other examples that you might relate to. I just shared about the early days in my business when I was primarily working solo. And then now fast forward to today, we have a team of 25, including myself. But that also means that I need to continuously look at what I'm spending my time on. I hate to break it to you, but growing a team is

not a one and done scenario where it's like, I've hired a virtual assistant. And now we're just, everything is good. I have help with these things. This is kind of those situations where it's like new level, new devil. So as soon as you feel like you've done a round of delegation and you have taken a look at your priorities and you're playing around with the best way to coordinate your schedule and to structure your time, as over time,

you know, that will work and then you reach a new level of growth and then you need to re-evaluate all of that again. So no matter where you're at in business, no matter where you're starting out or where you're at today, this is something that is just going to continue to evolve over time. So I know when I took a look at my schedule earlier this year, I was struggling with having kind of like choppy days is one example that I would say it. And my business coach pointed this out to me because

in an effort for me to try and be accommodating, right? There's an interesting word, accommodating, and be as available as possible for people to schedule calls with me, whether that be my clients, whether that be my team members or even potential clients, maybe even referral partners. I wanted to have as many times open as possible. But what happened was is that certainly plenty of days, I had very full meeting days, but...

There would be times where I would have a meeting and then I'd have about 20 minutes until my next one. And then maybe I'd have an hour to the next one. And it was just meant that I was switching on and off all day long, but I didn't have quite enough time to really get into deep project work. You probably know what I'm talking about. So what I ended up doing is shifting the way that my calendar is structured so that I have my meeting days and my non meeting days. The other indicator that could be that you are just not

white optimizing your time as best as you could be. It be if you find yourself often in reactive mode. I just gave you the examples of frequently answering questions that come in, whether it be from your customers or from your team, or maybe you're the one that is constantly solving problems, you're in reactive mode. That will certainly distract you from the bigger picture goals that you're working on in your business. Ultimately, these things are going to come in. Meetings are going to

They're going to fill up your calendar. These little fires that need to be put out, they're going to come in no matter what, right? There's only so much that we can do to prevent. Now we want to prevent as much as we can, but this stuff just comes up, you know, or your child gets sick and needs to come home from school. Well, kind of there goes my plan for the day. We want to be sure that we're prioritizing making time to work on your business rather than in it.

we know these things are going to fill up. So we want to prioritize that first. And so when we talk about designing your ideal work week as a CEO of your company or organization, we want to take a couple of steps here. And number one is to clarify your priorities. And before we start talking about work priorities, let's focus on home and family and personal priorities first. So ideally, when do you want to start work in the morning?

and when do you want to wrap up work at the end of the day? What does that look like? I know for me and many of my team members and clients, this looks like starting work after kids get on the bus to go to school or school drop off time. And then we wrap up shortly before, know, bus time in the afternoon or when kids need to be picked up and taken to their various activities, whatever life looks like for you these days. So I highly encourage you to put parameters around when you want to start.

and when you want to end work every day and kind of have these bookends, if you will. Because we also want to prioritize our family time so that we can be present with our loved ones and not constantly trying to play catch up or we're on our phones and trying to get caught up on emails. know, nobody's really present for that. And I don't think that that's how we want to be spending our evenings and weekends either. The other important thing to think about too is what are some of your hobbies or your goals or the things that you want to prioritize, whether that be

your friendships or maybe you're training for a marathon or like for me, this looks like also my book club. So I want to make sure that I'm prioritizing my book club and I've got that in my calendar. So we want to start with the home things first because work, there's always more that can be done. The work of a business owner, the work of an executive director, it's never done. There's always more opportunity. There's always more to do, but we want to make sure that we plan our personal time first.

And then let's move over to CEO work. So this can look like strategy time, your planning, your visioning, prioritizing growth and business development. These are the big picture things that are going to drive the business forward. This can also look like your sales time as well and developing strategic relationships and collaborations, ultimately again, contributing to business development. So we want to look for these most important

needle movers and put those in the calendar first. So we want to clarify what these priorities are. We're not quite at a point where we're going to plot this out on the calendar, but if you're playing along with us and you're writing these things down, what are the priorities both on a personal and a work level? Okay, the second step to designing your ideal work week is to look for opportunities to batch your work. So for example,

Today is Wednesday and I'm recording this. Wednesdays are my podcast and marketing days. So I generally don't take external meetings on Wednesdays. This is where I can heads down focus on recording podcasts and quality content for all of you. This is when I may meet with my marketing team to talk about our focus areas and priorities and our upcoming themes that we wanna be focusing on.

this is time that I may develop another webinar or an event that's coming up. You get the idea. But just for an example, we wanna batch the time that we're spending in these areas. So again, our brains aren't switching back and forth. So you can look like, as I had shared, maybe this looks like for you batching your meeting days, where you try and consolidate the time that you are meeting with others. I just mentioned like marketing and...

video and content creation, maybe you have a recording day, or maybe you're part of a networking group that meets, say, on Thursday mornings. And so you're going to have that be your networking focus, so you want to go to that networking meeting. And then maybe you want to have a one-on-one with somebody afterwards, and then that's your Thursday morning. Another area that you might want to consider batching is reviewing financials. Whether that be, depending on the stage where you're at in business, maybe there are particular days of the week where you focus on

you know, paying bills or invoicing clients or checking out your cash flow and budgeting for the upcoming month, all of that. Maybe there's a time that you want to block off for this. So look for opportunities to batch. So we're not constantly switching back and forth between different types of activities. Another idea could be theme days for you where maybe we're doing strategy work on Mondays. Maybe we're doing networking on Tuesdays. Maybe we are doing financials and product.

projections and meeting with our accountants or bookkeepers or CFOs on Wednesdays, you get the idea. Theme days might be your jam to kind of consolidate and help make sure that we're not switching the brain back and forth between different types of things each day. So once we start thinking about things that can be batched, then the third step is to block your calendar for alignment and productivity based on the items that we just talked about. So

First things first, what we wanna do is block off that personal time, like we talked about, because we wanna protect that work always seems to seep in. So we wanna put some parameters around that. And then we wanna leave open blocks where you wanna encourage people to schedule meetings with you. We wanna leave those open, especially if you use an online tool and scheduler to encourage people to book meetings with you, like maybe Calendly or Acuity, there are so many out there now, you get the idea.

but by leaving that open block of time, that tells that system, hey, there's no conflict, this is open and available. So we wanna leave those open. And then we wanna block off our heads down focus time. So we want to be blocking off and scheduling on the calendar. Maybe it's even, know we're talking about focus time, but one thing that I like to personally do is block off.

the first hour of every day and the last hour of every day, just to do maybe like email triage and you're making sure that my team is set for the day and questions are answered before I go on to do the next thing. Or maybe it's a daily wrap up where I'm wrapping up, going through emails for the day, maybe prepping for some things that are coming up the next day. That's one thing that I love to do. Okay, back down to our focus time. That is when we're going to prioritize. When are we doing our marketing work?

When are we meeting with potential referral partners? When are we doing our networking and block down that focused time as well, that dedicated time that we don't necessarily want to leave wide open for people to book. So all of that being said, I would love to hear from you. How do you structure your time? I'm just curious. It's always interesting to hear what's working for other entrepreneurs. Are there tips that can be shared with others? One side note, I do have a client who

She doesn't necessarily have the ability to block off large amounts of heads down focus time during her week because she's very client facing in the work that she does, but she does block the fourth week of every month, the last week of every month for no meetings. And that is when she has her whole week of heads down focus time. Even maybe makes some availability for some personal appointments as well if she needs to get in for ...

a massage or she'd like to get in for a massage or he's going for a doctor's appointment, a routine exam, that sort of thing. She reserves that week for her to prioritize herself and her business without the interruptions of meetings with others. So that's one other tactic as well. again, curious, how do you structure your time? Email me at hello at melissaswink.com. I would love to hear from you. Thanks so much for tuning into this week's episode and I'll be back.

next week with another episode of Make Space for More. Have a wonderful day.