Startup CEO, 2nd Edition

Chapter 41Creating a Personal Operating System

Without question, your time is your scarcest resource. There is only one of you in your company – and you can't hire a second you. Figuring out how to get the most out of your day is a critical skill. Figuring out how to optimize your team is an incredibly important part of managing yourself.

In this chapter, I'll discuss managing your agenda, managing your calendar, and managing your time. Think of these three sections in descending order of abstraction. Managing your agenda means understanding generally what you're supposed to be doing. Managing your calendar means making time for those things. Managing your time means being as productive as possible at those things as well as doing all of the important (or unimportant) distractions that invariably come up in your day.

While I'm going to talk about a few different tools for managing my time throughout this chapter, I generally refer to all of these tools together as my operating system. Just as your company has an operating system, you should have one, too.

Where Does Your Operating System Live?

I keep my operating system in Excel, but you can use any system you want: I know CEOs who keep their operating systems in Outlook, Google Drive, Evernote, Trello, and a range of other tools. There's no magic to any particular tool as long as you can access your operating system 24/7 on whatever device you happen to have at any point in time. Whatever and wherever your operating system ...