How This CEO Manages Three Companies And His Very Limited Time
Knotable CEO Amol
Sarva shares his tips for staying productive, avoiding pointless meetings, and
keeping priorities straight.
Amol Sarva does many things at once because he has to.
The cofounder of Virgin
Mobile USA and Halo Neuroscience, Sarva currently runs three businesses, give
or take. He's the founder of Knotable, a web-based
dashboard for managing and coordinating work. Meanwhile, Sarva is growing Halo, a brain-stimulation company that claims to improve performance,
and a coworking-space business, Knotel, which seems to double its headcount every time you blink.
After reading that, you
might not blink to learn that, when he gets up each morning, Sarva boils a pot
of pungent Himalayan herbs and lets it cool while he meditates for exactly 46
minutes, then swims 30 laps before recovering in a stand-up cryotherapy pod
that supercools his muscles—and clears his mind—at negative 105 degrees
Fahrenheit.
But Sarva doesn't do any of that. He just drinks black coffee and
has a really smart time-management philosophy.
Sarva's unorthodox strategy for managing his time and others',
meetings with colleagues, his companies' shifting priorities, and how those
determine what steps need to be taken when, all rests on a handful of guiding
principles. As he explains it, they're the foundation that allows him to work
effectively on so many things at once, while leaving room for the serendipity
that many of us cut out in the pursuit of focus. Here's a look at three of
them.
Sarva believes that good
time-management starts with defending his own—sometimes selfishly. "Your
time is the most valuable thing," he tells me. As a boss, he says, you
need to remember that before you decide how and whether to
spend it.
First, he blocks out time for solo work when and where there's
nobody else around. These are periods (and physical spaces) Sarva keeps
sacrosanct—they're for important work he can't delegate. "Try to do your
head-down work from somewhere where people can’t find you," he advises.
"If you’ve blocked out time for other people, then you should be able to
disappear like this without a problem."
The meeting is the event
by which time something needs to be done . . . "We're all here for the
meeting. Where's the output?"
Then, in what may be an inversion of typical priorities, Sarva
schedules space for unstructured social time, so the people he works with know
he's around and available for them, often while he's "sitting at the bar,
at the front of the office. "No one really needs to know that
schedule," he says, "but you need office hours."
Third, he suggests,
publicize what you’re up to and thinking, so people can come to you with ideas
rather than having to always seek input individually. "There's so many
people who bottle up all of their progress, their problems, their questions,
their ideas—and it's not needed." Sarva suggests a newsletter or some type
of social media broadcast (Hootsuite CEO Ryan Holmes recently started using video for
this purpose); it works as well for employees as it does outsiders, he says.
Sarva only meets with other people when it serves one of three
functions:
1. Solving a problem
together. Interchange leads to problem-solving, Sarva explains. This
works best in small groups or in one-on-one meetings. Big group meetings don’t
accomplish this well, he believes.
2. Marking a deadline. The
meeting is the event by which time something needs to be done. "They
create the social burden of like, ‘We're all here for the meeting. Where's the
output?’"
3. Socializing. Sometimes
you just need to hang with your people, Sarva says. His favorite format for
this type of meeting is simply walking around and talking to his employees
during the workday—it's not a get-in-a-room-together-at-a-specific-time sort of
thing. "You're not overcommitting time on a specific agenda item,"
Sarva explains. "Just show up and get a feel for what's going on."
That counts in his mind as a "meeting," too—and it's often more
effective than most.
On the other hand, Sarva cautions against using meetings for the
following functions, which you can do electronically and remotely instead:
·
Information dissemination
·
Coordination of tasks
·
Analysis
3. KEEP YOUR PRIORITIES IN FULL VIEW—AND DON'T HESITATE TO SHARE
THEM
Managing time and managing priorities aren't two totally separate
affairs, but they're not identical, either. To keep his priorities in order
while he goes about apportioning time, Sarva has a few tricks.
If you write out
specifically how to do things, he believes, you can trust others to take them
on without you being there.
First, he makes "now
and later" lists inspired by David Allen’s methodology,
which helps Sarva decide what needs tackling now and what can wait.
"Now" doesn't always mean "first thing in the morning,"
though. Sarva tends to schedule solo-work blocks for important (but not
necessarily urgent) tasks in the mornings, before the randomness of the day can
butt in. Top priorities aren't always the most pressing, and vice versa.
When it comes to
prioritizing, though, Sarva shoots for specifics with an emphasis on action. If
you write out specifically how to do things, he believes, you can trust others
to take them on without you being there. After all, what good are your priorities
as a leader if you can't be sure your teams share them? "Processes allow
delegation," Sarva adds.
Sarva breaks down big projects and tasks into "cards,"
or components that you can look at visually and solve in concrete steps. In
fact, this may be his biggest productivity secret. It’s the premise for
Knotable, an app that's designed to help people take better notes, keep them
organized, and use them collaboratively.
Sarva points out that the proverbial journey of 1,000 miles begins
with a single step, but as a manager he knows it's his job to see all of the
steps ahead—or at least as many as he can. Sarva's intent behind Knotable is to
create a "manager’s dashboard" offering a bird’s eye view of all of his
projects. It’s sort of a "meta-" project manager that adds strategic
planning on top of typical to-do apps that tends to be more atomic and
structured than what Sarva thinks managers really need, which is to see—and
arrange—the whole picture at once.
That's never any easy job, Sarva knows, but it's a manageable one.
SHANE SNOW https://www.fastcompany.com/3066033/work-smart/how-this-ceo-manages-three-companies-and-his-very-limited-time
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