How do I spend my time as a part-time CEO?
Taking on a venture is a lot of work. Doing so with limited time is even harder. This is what I am doing with Studio89. One application of the 7 areas of knowledge framework is using it as a starting point to organize all the tasks that I need to do to start a business. I started by creating a Notion table to make a list of all the activities that I need to do, and tagging them with each one of the 7 areas of knowledge. Each area is a bucket that holds related tasks.
Once I have did a brain dump of all the activities on plates I went over each one and asked myself “Do I have to do this myself or can I delegate all or some of it?“.
Finally, I created a new calendar called “Time blocks” where I allocated recurring blocks of time to tackle my to do list. What is time blocking? According to Forbes: “Time blocking is the practice of planning your schedule for the day in advance by blocking every hour of your day for specific tasks and responsibilities. It’s just like creating a to-do list, but here you know when exactly to do what. So it’s actually a more specific kind of to-do list that works brilliantly in helping you get things done more effectively.”
What’s on my plate as CEO?
Human behavior: activities like customer research and networking.
Artifact Creation: Branding and content creations like filming.
Physical Fabrication: Currently, I am not producing any physical products, so nothing here.
Strategy and Operations: Ideation: My favorite thing to do! My core competency. As Simon Sinek describes in his book Start with Why, there are two types of CEOs the visionary one and the doer. I most definitely fall in the first camp. I have been blessed with the ability to imagine futures in vidid details and work very hard to manifest these future. Now you’re probably thinking don’t you have to execute to manifest these big dreams of yours? Yes, I do execute, but I struggle in it. My brain doesn’t function like that. It’s more of a necessary evil. The path I have to walk to get to the destination I envisioned.
Do I have to do this myself or can I delegate all or some of it?
Like I said above, this is my core competency. It’s what I enjoy most. I would not delegate this to anyone else. That being said, if and when my company grows and I have multiple people on my team, then the ideation part of things become ore of a team sport. Diversity of perspective always wins out over a singular vision. At the end of the day, we are humans and our opinions are colored by our own experiences. Other tasks that falls under strategy and operations include planning — i.e., doing the things I am describing in this post — legal, and so much more.
Communication and Linguistics: Marketing, Content Design: blog posts, video scripts, maybe even podcast structure.
Math + Statistics: Traffic analysis, conversion, bounce rate, financial planning.
Programming: Programming is becoming more and more accessible. If I were creating this company at the same time I attempted to create my first one (2011), I probably would be spending the majority of my time writing HTML and CSS and Googling how to center a <div> horizontally — I am kinda dating myself here. However, thanks to companies like Squarespace, creating a website is breeze.
Timeblocking
I am a part-time CEO. I can only spare 15–20 hours a week on this company. This is how I am going to split my time among the 7 different buckets.
Your Turn
I created a Notion template to breakdown my responsibilities. You can download it here and get organized.
