How to Time Block Like a Leader
Your Time, Your Way
Protect Quiet Time for Focused Work
Carl advises protecting undisturbed time for reading or focused tasks, citing presidents' routines.
Have you ever wondered how those in highly demanding jobs that require almost 24/7 attention to the job manage to do it? Well, I’ve been researching and found a few common habits that may help you get more out of your day.
Let’s begin…
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Script | 410
Hello, and welcome to episode 410 of the Your Time, Your Way Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development, and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein, and I am your host of this show.
It seems everyone feels under pressure with increasing workloads and demands on their time. And research is backing this up.
Instead of reducing the workloads of the typical knowledge worker, AI is increasing it. In one study published last month in the Harvard Business Review, 83% of knowledge workers reported an increase in their workloads after adopting AI tools.
Yet even in the age before AI, smartphones, and desktop computers, there were jobs that required an intensity few people could or would endure for very long.
For example, if you were to look at the daily schedules of Presidents Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, Ford, and Carter, you would see an official workday beginning around 6:30 am and ending well after 7:00 pm, 7 days a week.
Just look at pictures of President Carter on his inauguration day and compare them to pictures of him on President Reagan’s inauguration day; you can see the toll the presidency had on Carter. It seemed to have aged him 20 years, and yet it was only four.
If we were to look at President Obama’s schedule. While he did not typically start work until around 9:00 am, he would work well into the night, catching up on briefing documents and other background reading. In total, he was working 12 hours a day, seven days a week.
Yet each of these leaders used techniques that helped maintain some calm amid otherwise chaotic days. They were well-tested, proven techniques that so many people seem afraid to use today.
This week’s question is about these techniques and how you might adopt some of them to manage your workload while still having time for rest and family.
Let me now hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question.
This week’s question comes from Aaron. Aaron asks. Hi Carl, what advice would you give to someone who cannot get on top of their work, no matter how many “time blocks” they put on their calendar?
Hi Aaron, thank you for your question.
Now, you didn’t specify what kind of work you do, but I can answer based on what I’ve learned from former world leaders and CEOs and how they managed their days when facing global challenges.
I know not all of us are running a major country, but lessons from people like Presidents Eisenhower, Kennedy and Ford may help you see that there are ways to take control of your time, do the things you want to do, and get a lot done.
The first approach almost all highly effective people do is to protect time for quiet work. This might not necessarily be deep focused work; it could be reading reports or, in the case of presidents and prime ministers, briefing documents prepared for them by their staff.
Of the people I have read about and studied, all of them protected some time during the day. Mostly, this was early in the morning or late at night.
John F Kennedy, for instance, would read the newspapers at 6:30 am, before he met anyone in his office. This gave him a heads-up on emerging world events and often meant he knew more about a subject than any of his aides did.
One interesting note about Kennedy and his brother, Bobby, was that they both took a speed-reading course when they were younger, and it is reported that John Kennedy could read 1,200 words in one minute.
Imagine that. That’s going to save you a lot of time. That’s being able to read one of my longer blog posts in a single minute!
As a side note, it is reported that Theodore Roosevelt would read a book a day, sometimes two, as well as all his briefing documents.
Now, I suspect that in the early to mid 20th century, with no computers, people read far more than we do today. If you are reading thousands of words a day, you’re naturally going to become a faster reader.
Presidents Nixon, Kennedy and Johnson would read briefing documents late into the night. In the case of Presidents Johnson and Nixon, this was often until 2:00 am in the morning.
President Obama also read late into the evening, from around 8:30 pm, after spending some time with his family, he would go to a quiet room and read until midnight or 1 am.
The advantage of doing their reading late at night was that they were unlikely to be disturbed, and it was quiet.
One thing you could do is set aside time somewhere in your day for undisturbed quiet work. Whether that is reading, working on a project or simply replying to your emails and messages.
Just this one change in your day will relieve some of the pressure you may be feeling. It will give you time to work on the non-urgent things that, if you ignore, will soon become urgent and add to the stress and anxiety that working reactively inevitably causes.
Now let’s talk about structuring your day.
This is something that, if you’re not doing, you’ll find yourself getting pulled all over the place with no chance of getting on with anything important.
Structuring your day means planning out what you will do and when. When will you do your most important tasks of the day? When and where are your meetings? When will you take time to rest and relax with your family?
If you begin any day not knowing this, your day will run away with you.
Again, let me give you an example of a US president.
Jimmy Carter would disappear into the living quarters of the While House at precisely 6:30 pm every evening to have dinner with his family.
No matter what was going on in the world. Whether it was a Middle Eastern oil crisis, spiralling inflation or some other world crisis (sound familiar?), Carter would never miss his family’s dinner hour. It was sacred.
During that time, nobody from his office was allowed to interrupt him, no matter what was going on in the world. That could wait an hour. Spending some quality time with his family could not. His daughter was young at that time, and she would go to bed around 8 or 9 pm.
Could you do that? Could you “disappear between 12 pm and 1 pm, cut off from the outside world; no phone or computer for one hour, so you could stop and enjoy lunch with your family or friends?
It’s easy to believe that we have to be “available” all the time. No, you do not.
Not even the leader of the Western world needed to be available every hour and minute of the day.
You’re not dealing with a world crisis where people’s lives are at stake. You’re likely dealing with more mundane issues, like a customer who is frustrated because their ordered electric window motor hasn’t arrived as promised. Or a boss who suddenly becomes agitated because sales dropped 12% last month.
Gee whizz! What can you do right now? Probably nothing. You’re not going to be able to miraculously produce an electric window motor in a few seconds, nor can you change last month’s sales figures.
These things can wait an hour or two. They really can!
This is why, when I get clients to do the “perfect week” exercise, I ask them to do their personal life first. This is the one area most people will sacrifice for their work.
When will you spend time with your family? When will you exercise? When will you spend time on your hobby?
These should be your non-negotiables every day.
President Eisenhower would stop work at 3:30 pm every day to spend an hour or two practising his golf on the White House putting green.
President Johnson would go for his daily swim at 2:00 pm every day.
And Gerald Ford would start his day with an hour on his custom-built static bicycle and finish off with 50 push-ups. Every day!
It did not matter what was going on in the world; these presidents knew that exercise was important for them to function, and they made sure they were clear-headed enough to make the right decisions on some of the world’s biggest and most urgent problems.
Your customer’s missing electric window motor or your boss fretting about a 12% drop in sales is nothing compared to what these presidents had to deal with every day.
Make sure that what is important to you is prioritised, time protected and non-negotiable.
Urgent events will pass, and your being unavailable for an hour or two is not going to significantly affect the result one way or the other.
Another part of all these presidents’ days was taken straight out of Winston Churchill’s daily routine.
The daily nap.
When you are tired, stressed, anxious, and worn down by the constant noise and decision-making, you will no longer be able to make good, rational decisions. It’s as if your brain tightens up and can no longer access your creative thinking.
Winston Churchill discovered this while serving in the army in India in the early 1900s. India is very hot during the day, and it was customary among the officer class to take naps during the warmest part of the day.
Churchill discovered that by taking a proper nap mid to late afternoon, you could do high-quality work well into the evening. And so, when he returned to the UK, he continued to take naps.
As Churchill said, "Nature has not intended mankind to work from eight in the morning until midnight without that refreshment of blessed oblivion which, even if it only lasts twenty minutes, is sufficient to renew all the vital forces.”
Presidents Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon and Carter all took daily naps. Ranging from 30 to 60 minutes. It was their way of shutting out the noise of presidential work and giving their brains time to re-energise and refresh.
I remember when I first came to Korea and discovered that many of the office workers I was teaching were working 18-hour days and surviving on only 3 to 4 hours of sleep.
I asked them how they managed to do that six days a week, and they replied that they took a nap when they returned from lunch.
Korean office workers are legendary for eating a full lunch in less than fifteen minutes. That left them with forty-five minutes to an hour for a nap.
Not so common today, working hours in Korea have reduced over the last ten years or so, but back in the early 2000s, work hours here were gruelling.
So there you go, Aaron. There are ways of managing our workloads. It may mean you need to consider redesigning your work hours. The 9-to-5 concept is a relatively recent one. Before the 1980s, people in positions of authority would take longer lunches, and these were often social; and they would do much of their focused work either early in the morning or late at night (Tim Cook still does this)
But whatever you do, put your life first. Work is fleeting. Yes, it’s a part of your life and an important one, but it is only a part of your life. Your personal life matters too.
Put your family and friends and health, both physical and mental, first. Then decide how you will structure your days so that the important things get done.
I hope that has helped. And don’t forget that my Spring sale ends on Tuesday, 31 March (two days left). If you want to pick up my recent Time-Based Productivity course (which includes free access to the Time Sector System course) for just $99.00, you have about 48 hours left to get it.
Plus, you can save $50 on my 2-session coaching programme. A great way for me to help you personally get control of your system so you are more focused and clear-headed about what needs to be done and when.
I will put all the details in the show notes.
Thank you, Aaron, for your question, and thank you to you, too, for listening.
It just remains for me now to wish you all a very, very productive week.
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