So a Sunday evening of any week.

How the hell do you organize your time when you are managing a startup?

So a Sunday evening of any week. I go to my business Assembla space and check the cardwall for the stuff to do, I check too the backlog to decide what else we should be doing the week that is just about to start. I think about it. I decide. Add some comments in Assembla tasks and add my stuff to my small agenda. Good to go.

A Monday morning of any week. I open my agenda, I think to remember what I have to do. I boot my laptop, I start claws-mail, I start skype … then all gets blurry.

A Monday evening of any week. I stare at my agenda. I want to cross something. Most often than not, I can’t.

It is not that bad all days or all weeks but surely it is not like it feels it should be.

Of course I have read quite a lot about what I should be doing. Opening email and skype just at specific times, carefully planning beforehand what you want to do and achieve, prioritize, learn to say no, learn to delegate blablabla.

Now the reasons I think I struggle to do all that, at least for the job that I am supposed to do (I am director and CTO at Cloudways):

• Being in an operational position and being an startup, I need to be reachable.
• If I am reachable, anything can happen at any time that I have not and I can’t plan for.
• Even If I try not to be reachable, the priorities change pretty quickly. Again very difficult to assess. Surely long/mid term priorities do not change but the thing is how to plan for them.
• I am jumping constantly from one thing to another (as I need to be reachable and as said, then anything can happen at any time) and although I have got used to it (have to say that may be I am even good at it!) I assume productivity suffers.

Guess all that very familiar to many of you.

As said, I have read a bit about all this and surely I have got better at it (but I always want to improve, that’s my fault), so what have worked for me so far:

• Having a paper agenda. No tablets, smart-phones, google calendars … plain paper. I don’t recall where I read about this, it was about a year ago. It said that when we write stuff we retain more consciously the information ( I guess due to the effort of handwriting, I had nearly completely forgotten how to do it). No idea why, but it works for me.
• Going to bed at a reasonable time and, if possible, more or less at the same time everyday. I used to work (or pretend to) until 3-4 am and wake up at 8-9 am. Then zombie for most of the day. Although that I still struggle with this one, when I succeed, there is an obvious improvement of my overall performance and focus.

And that should be about it. Not much else has had any significant effect.

What has prompted me writing this was reading this article a couple of days ago. I was trying to develop my daily routine as I am absolutely certain that this must work. No doubt.

But I was staring to a blank page for a while, incapable of envisaging how the hell I could build my daily routine with the type of work I do. Pretty sure I must not be alone looking at this very same blank page.