Profession: CEO

Workday:

[0500] First alarm goes off and is immediately switched off by Daytime George, who is being expected to cash a check for being fine on 4.5hours of sleep which Nightime George inconsiderately wrote whilst reading the night before.

[0530] Reluctantly wake up and open laptop or phone if it's vibrating. Spend 60 minutes catching up on news, looking at schedule, preparing for my day. Lately have been waking up to texts from a friend in a different timezone, who has a toddler, with whatever weird thing the kid has been up to. It's the best way to start the day as someone who enjoys cute pictures of children with spaghetti on their face but has no intention of ever siring an heir.

[0700] Start on emails: mix of sending emails (I hold off from emailing my colleagues late at night because that feels more oppressive than early in the morning, so there's usually 5-10 here) and writing my own To Do list in my draft emails.

[0800] Arrive at wherever I'm eating breakfast. I try to have breakfast mtgs instead of lunch. If I'm not having a meeting I try to catch up with someone who I really like but don't see enough of.

[0930-1030] Depending on how long breakfast was, arrive into the office. Make sure dog has water in his bowl. Do emails and start with meetings.

[1100-1300] Depending on the day of the week I have my senior team meeting, catching up on all areas of the business (once per week), 1:1s with my direct reports (we go for a walk), or specific focus on an area of the business and how we can do better (marketing, product, sales). I just switched to a standing desk. It's making me more focused somehow.

[1330] Depending on the day will get about 30 minutes for lunch. Usually means a five minute walk with my dog to the park and one other member of the team. We use it as a chance to stretch our legs and talk about a mixture of work and personal stuff.

[1400] I go to the gym in this timeslot every day with no excuses, for 75 minutes. (My gym is about a 45 second walk from the office.) I started doing this in November and it's been great for my health and stress levels. Going after lunch and before I start on workflow.

[1520] Try to focus on workflow during this part of the day: no meetings or external distractions, just working on presentations, spreadsheets, forecasting, or whatever it is I need to get done. This is where I get the bulk of the work done where I can look back and think "I did a thing today". When I'm mentoring or talking through ideas or doing a 1:1 with someone, one of my big blind spots is not seeing that as "work". I think it's a mindset in a lot of startup founders who are used to their economic worth being judged by "output" as quantified by a volume of high quality tangible documents or assets.

[1700] Take the dog outside for a second much shorter walk.

[1715] We have a few meetings in the evenings which I usually gear up for here.

[1800] Evening meetings are usually fun ones - product review, design review, engineering review.

[1900] Order some food and wrap up loose ends. Trying very hard this year to thank people for doing good work and so might go back through my email inbox and send a "thanks" to someone who has done something great, or let someone know I appreciated an email. Also today using this time to answer interesting questions on Hacker News! :)

[1930] Walk home with dog. Sporadically use this time to speak to friends who want advice about their startup.

[2030] Home! Poker, TV, reading.

[0000] Daytime George won't mind 30 more minutes of reading, this book is just getting interesting…

Would say most common types of work I'm doing are: setting direction and mentoring with the team; feeding back on execution; suggesting ideas; UX and UI review; shareholder management/fiduciary stuff; and hiring.