045: Five Essential Executive Skills in Tech Not Taught in School

How many hours can you work a day? How much rest and renewal do you need to be your effective self? When I started working at Accenture right out of college, there were points at my career where I thought, is this even allowed? And I'm here to tell you, yes, this is allowed because all of these skills that I'm walking you through today will make you better for the company. 

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Welcome to Tech Careers and Money Talk. I'm your host, Christopher Nelson, and this episode today is going to give you a ton of insights and a ton of value in understanding five executive skills that schools do not teach you. 

Five executive skills that you will need to be successful as your career progresses that you're not going to learn in school. These were skills that I had to learn on the job. And I want to make sure and share those with you today. This was a request. Yes, it came in. I ran a survey in my newsletter tech careers and money news.com. 

If you go there, I have a weekly newsletter that gets released on Tuesday, afternoons to support the podcast and give breakdowns of more frameworks that you can use to grow your careers, build wealth, and make an impact in this world. And I put out a survey, what do people want to learn more about? And one of the things that people came back with a resounding, please help us, was executive skills. 

And it's no surprise. It's no surprise that For people who are growing their careers in technology, when they get to a point to they're a director or a senior director, and they have this role where they need to manage multiple teams of people with different needs, and they're across multiple spectrum of technology even, that they're going to butt up against a limit. And this limit is going to be how much they can just work, how much they can literally just work to get things done. 

And so what you need to develop is there's a set of executive skills that make people successful from director all the way up to the C-suite, not taught in schools that historically you learned by getting mentored or getting professional coaches to help you or reading books off the shelves. 

And essentially the skills that I'm going to cover today are the five, what I think are most important, the fundamental, the basics that if you can get a fundamental understanding and implement these, in your day-to-day, they will allow you to be a lot more effective, meaning that you're going to be able to deliver more concentrated value in the conversations that you have, in the solutions that you're trying to create and solve. And then it'll also make you more efficient, right? You'll be able to start removing some of the noise. So I'm excited to get into this because these skills are gonna provide a direct benefit to you. right? We move at speed and technology. 

We are working, you know, it feels like we're strapped to the front of a train going 60 miles an hour. And in the midst of this, with these skills that we're going to walk through, you're going to be able to be more effective, get more things done in less time. This is going to give you time back, which we all need, and also help you reduce stress and anxiety. And when you reduce stress and anxiety, as I personally know, you're going to get better sleep. And that's going to, again, give you more energy for when you're going into every workday. That's going to position you for promotion.

 It's going to also help you with your family. You're going to be more energized and more present. So it's important to share where I learned this or earned it. I think that that framework is important and is part of this podcast. And I learned it when I was in a director role at Splunk. Splunk was a company that was growing almost a hundred percent year over year from a revenue perspective. 

from an employee perspective, it was the epitome of hyper growth. And so with a company that's growing so fast, it became apparent as I looked ahead and saw what was going to be required of me that my skills weren't going to work. And tactically, as I came into Splunk, My area of expertise was in Salesforce.com. I had been working for Accenture and I had been delivering a lot of programs and I've been focused on Salesforce.com, was a Salesforce.com technical architect, and then became a senior delivery manager. 

And that was my expertise. Now I'm working at Splunk and I also had NetSuite under my purview and a team that managed finances. I also then was onboarding to Workday and taking that on in addition to an integration team. So I needed a set of skills that was going to help me be present for all of those teams and manage all of the different work that was coming in from those. So let's get into the skills. 

What are the five skills and how can they be effectively integrated into your professional life? Number one is setting healthy boundaries. Where I have seen many executives as they grow tip over is they don't know where and how to draw a line and they essentially the work starts to bury them. So setting healthy boundaries is important. and knowing, and part of that setting healthy boundaries is knowing your personal limits. We'll dig into these in more detail, but let me just give you the list. Setting healthy boundaries, managing up, calendar slash time blocking, and this is offense and defense, and I'll walk you through what those mean. A startup and shutdown ritual for the day. So having a moment in the day where you do your startup, you do your shutdown. And then unplugging your mind from work regularly. 

That is absolutely critical. If you want to continue to progress in your career, you have to understand how do you unplug. And the higher that your career ascends from director to VP, senior VP, or C-suite, this becomes even more important. Because if you can't unplug and really rejuvenate, then things aren't going to end well. It's going to get pretty ugly out there, I can tell you. So those are the five that we're going to cover today. And it's when I list these down, it becomes sort of obvious. OK, traditional education doesn't cover these. There's not a course that I know of today. 

If anybody knows, please send an email anytime you want to ask ASK. at techcareersandmoneytalk.com where there's a contact form on the techcareersandmoneytalk.com website. Let me know if there's somebody that is in a, I'm talking traditional four-year college or university that's offering this. Please let me know. I'm very curious. 

But I don't see widespread a traditional education that focuses on these skills that can help you move forward. And so if you imagine if you had these skills, if you walked into your career from day one, not even being a manager, but just being an individual contributor, and you were able to set the healthy boundaries, you were able to manage up, you understood how to block and manage your calendar and your time, you had a startup and shutdown ritual, you're in plugging, how much more effective would you be? 

Because as I talk about all the time, your skills get honed over time, so then as you start moving up to management and then you move to executive leadership, you would have all these skills hardened And so you may not have had that experience. You may not have had that exposure, but we're going to today give you a crash course in these particular skills. 

So I really want to dig into the, the conceptual strategies and overview in the first part of the podcast, then take a quick break. And the second part of the podcast, I want to dig into how can you get started with these today? It's so important for me that you understand how to implement some of these strategies and at least get your toe, get your foothold. 

I don't, I didn't want to say toe in the water. I didn't want to use that analogy. I wanted to use, it's more of you trying to get a foothold cause you're trying to climb or climbing this career ladder. And so these skills are super important. So keep listening. I'm going to break down each of these skills and help you understand the broad concepts of what they are. And then we're going to talk about how you can go and start taking some steps to implement these today. 

As soon as you listen to this podcast, there's no excuse for you not doing a shutdown routine that day or for starting to do some of the calendar blocking, et cetera, that's going to start setting you up for success. I would not have been able to grow my career to the point of where I was a chief information officer or served in roles of vice president or senior directors in these companies that went through IPOs.

I worked for three companies that went through initial public offerings, I wouldn't have been able to do that without the skill set. So that's how important this is. And the other executives that are my friends, we talk about this. These are things that we share ideas and concepts of how to get better at these things. 

So listen up, listen close. Okay, let's dive deep. We're going down. Setting healthy boundaries. This is where I see many people in technology go sideways is they don't have a framework for how to set healthy boundaries. Part of healthy boundaries is you understanding and defining your limits. Meaning, how many hours can you work a day for a week, for a month, for a quarter? 

How much rest and renewal do you need to be your effective self? It's important that you start asking yourself these questions and understanding these things to start setting healthy boundaries. So, With healthy boundaries you're going to maintain clarity and be able to articulate what you can and what you can't do that's going to allow you better to integrate for work to be integrated into your life. Now I don't say the word balance there and I don't say it for a reason because depending on where we are in our career we could be incredibly out of balance because money is made through concentration. That's concentration of time, concentration of stock position, right? And then it's maintained through diversification. 

So as you move up in your career, you can diversify this. And I'm going to get back to this example in a minute, but clear boundaries are saying, when are you going to be available and not available? There are going to be times when you're not going to be available for work, and that's okay.

 And that's, again, creating a framework where you can start having these conversations. Oh, I'm not available when I get home at five. I have dinnertime with my family and dinnertime is sacred for us. I'm not going to be available for that two hours. Oh, you know, every Saturday morning I do this. I have this time with my friends. It's focused. I'm not going to be available. Right. Walking through and setting up some of those boundaries is really important. And this is the boundaries. This isn't the calendaring. We'll talk about that in a minute, but also let's talk about vacation. So many people I know in tech would go and take vacations and still be checking email and still be plugged in. That's not having a healthy boundary. That's not saying I need to step away and I need to be offline. 

But this is where the boundary is really talking about when you're offline versus when you're online. And so you need to be able to have conversations And this is why it's a skill. The first time you have this conversation, it's going to feel awkward. It's going to feel weird. And I know there were points at my career where I thought, is this even allowed? 

And I'm here to tell you, yes, this is allowed because all of these skills that I'm walking you through today will make you better for the company. And that's all of these when they're asking for rationale, well, why you need to be unplugged? Why are you offline? It's because I need time to renew so that I can be my best self for this company. That's why it's so important. 

And when you're setting boundaries, it's important to understand that for career progression, you're going to need flexibility. You're also going to need to understand when you are going to have concentrated amount of times where things are going to be out of balance and you're going to be putting more time into work than less. So let me use the example of my career. 

When I started working at Accenture, Right out of college, and I started in 2002, I knew that I wanted to work very hard. I wanted to learn a lot of skills. And so my limit was, I was very focused on working hard for Accenture. And I would work in these long, you know, month or two month sprints. And then I would get to the end of a project. 

And then I would take a week or so off and just really relax and really unwind. And that was the cadence for that part of my career is long periods of very focused work. And sometimes I would even transition from work to going to some of their training facilities and getting training. And I was in this hyper grow mode.

 And then I was in these very concentrated times of just unplugged. Like I was off projects, meaning that I didn't need to pick up the phone. I was not doing any training. So I could literally go far, far away. And it was really at this point in time, I really started in 2004, going and spending a lot of time abroad in Argentina and studying Spanish and literally going off the grid. 

And so I had long periods of work and long periods or longer periods in very concentrated rest. Then as my career started growing, I realized that I needed to set those boundaries differently because my life was changing. As I then moved into managerial roles, I would realize that, okay, I needed more time during the week and I needed to set time that I was unplugging, you know, Friday afternoon, and I was, you know, out for the weekend. 

And then I was coming back and really trying to establish that it maybe it was a couple weekends a month. Because when you on some of these projects, when you are working for some of these companies, you know, especially if they're global, people are inbound to you all the time. 

But I was able to start establishing those boundaries. So where did my career end up when I had my last role? When I was at GitLab, I had my dinner times were sacred. I had times during the day that I was going out for health breaks. And it was also a company where they were focused on results, not time spent. 

So there was a lot of mutual back and forth of where and how I was spending my time. And so I could make sure and have boundaries that accommodated for all the things that were important for me to be my best for the company. And so essentially that's what boundaries are, is you are setting up these, these boundaries that say, here are my limits and here's what I can do. 

And here's what I can't do. And you're having healthy conversations around that. And the more you learn that, the more you're gonna be able to manage because you're going to be able to get that, the rest and recovery on the backside that you need to be your more effective self. 

So right behind setting boundaries is managing up. Managing up is when you develop strategies to communicate and align with your manager. And sometimes your manager's manager, sometimes what's called your skip level, whoever is right above your manager, but developing strategies to align with them. 

And you want to make sure that you're getting mutual understanding, what they need, and they're understanding what you need. And taking that to the point where you can influence, again, they're your managers, so you're not going to be able to manage them, but you want to be able to influence them to ensure that they're helping support your boundaries, the things that you need for the team, etc. 

And so it's important that in this process, there's a lot of listening that's going on to understand what your manager is trying to accomplish, what their boss is trying to accomplish. If you can understand 2 levels up what your management is trying to accomplish, you essentially want to get aligned with them. you want to get aligned and understand what your team is doing. 

It's helping them be successful. This is a concept that I called aligned leverage, meaning that you can be partnering with your manager and their manager to help them win. And then, then a lot of that benefit is coming back to you and your team because you're, you're being seen as somebody who is helping the entire team win up and down the chain. 

So for example, and when I was at Splunk, there was a large quoting project. We were replacing the tool inside of salesforce.com to do quoting, to do pricing. And the result of this, the desired result was to increase quoting speed by 25% across the enterprise. This was something that had a lot of My boss, the chief information officer reported to the CEO, Godfrey Sullivan. 

Godfrey was very focused on meeting that goal. So then that was very important to my boss, who his name was Doug Haar. And those gentlemen, when I was meeting and I was reading out on that report, they were very supportive of that. And as I was able to then share with my boss, what was some of the things that were maybe detracting or some of the things I needed help with, he could fly air cover, he could support me in what I needed in the rest of my book of business to make sure that I was successful there. 

All doing this with boundaries, also understanding, hey, when teammates who are on that project are getting close to burnout, hey, they need some rest, they need to recover because we want to be successful and we can't have people on the team that are trying to help us accomplish our shared goal and visions, goal and vision falling down. 

So this is why This this concept of managing up is critical and I think setting boundaries managing up if those are just two things that you're doing outside right outside of the The gate when you're getting started in your executive career that will help you tremendously, but don't stop there. 

Keep going Let's talk about calendar and time blocking now calendar blocking is can be offensive and can be defensive. Time blocking is a time management strategy, and I could honestly do a whole other podcast on that. If people are interested, please send me a request at ask at techcareersandmoneytalk.com because I do want to make sure that everyone who's listening can influence the content that's being created here because this is for you to see you be successful in your careers.

So calendar and time blocking, let's start with calendar blocking, right? And this is cascading, when you all of a sudden start understanding, you know, your boundaries, there's, you want to start what I call defensive calendar blocking, where you start putting things on your calendar that are your boundaries, you want to start locking those in first and foremost. You also want to master this art of scheduling by making sure that you are putting on the calendar the things that are important for you, the things that you also know are going to be important for your manager, right? What are the meetings that he needs to make sure that you're attending to support him? And then you're able to, what I call the offensive, is then you're filling up your calendar with the things that you're going to do. 

And this steps into time blocking, calendar time blocking. And this is offensive and defensive. So let me break this down for you. You want to make sure that you are blocking your calendar with the things that you're doing. for the company and also when you have time that you need for yourself. It's essential. 

If you do not manage your calendar, somebody else is going to manage it for you. What I mean is people are going to start shoehorning in your calendar. Now, the feedback people give me this false concern, this false expectation appearing real, this fear of, well, wait, if I'm blocking off all my time, then will I not be available to people? And of course you want to be available to people, but you need to make sure that it works for you. You need to protect your time and you need to be an asset. 

If you're a commodity and you are always available and you're always online, people are not going to see your time as valuable, but the more you have all of the things that you need to do to be the most productive executive that you can, and to also be your best self showing up for the company. And you provide people the opportunity to get time when it's convenient for you. 

That is the most effective that you can be. Now, again, taking this with a grain of salt, this means that, you know, you, you want to make sure that when you do have your manager or manager's manager, they know when are the time slots that you have flexibility that when you're available over communicate that to them. But when it's everybody else in the organization, then you want to make sure that you're managing that and you're feeding it into a Calendly link where they have very specific access for very specific amount of time. 

And you also want to make sure that people are getting on your calendar for a reason that is going to help you move your workday, move your projects forward. But don't let people rein in and take over your calendar. So defensive time blocking is saying, here's the times when I'm not going to be available for work or anything. That's defense. You're taking care of yourself. making sure that you're going to be in the best state possible to work. Offensive is where you're putting in all of the things that you need to move the ball forward, to move your work forward. You're putting all of those things on the calendar. And then you're leaving open very strategic locations for people if they need time with you. 

I would also encourage you going back up to boundary setting, saying, if you want my time, I would love to see the agenda first. I want to understand, you know, if somebody else from my team needs to be there, or what are we trying to accomplish in this time together, so that the expectation of what's needed from me is crystal clear. My target was always to get a rolling two weeks. 

Meaning, I want to have two weeks and as I'm closing off this week, I'm doing not next week, but the following week. I'm constantly filling that out because what I found, I guess this is the cheat code for tech, is things many times are moving so fast that people don't look really beyond two weeks in your calendar. 

That's how it worked for me. The other one is the startup and shut down ritual. So ritual, not routine ritual, meaning this is something that you do all the time, and you break it down into these comprehensive steps. so that you can be prepared to perform. So the concept of ritual comes from a lot of high performance sports training where you see players before games, before matches, they prepare in the same way every time to ensure that they're ready to perform their best. 

There's been a lot of data to support this. But if you create a systematic way to start your work day, and I want to make sure I'm talking about a work startup and shutdown ritual. I'm not talking about a morning routine. I'm not talking about ice baths. I'm not talking about journaling or meditation. 

I'm saying You are sitting down in the morning, you sit down every day, and you look over what are your list of priorities for the quarter, and you're putting on your list of things to do. Here's the top three things I want to get done today that align to that list. You know, you are deciding how and when you're going to get your deep work done. 

You are then Taking time to look through your calendar and making sure that everything on your calendar makes sense And if it doesn't you're deleting it that is then the morning routine Then you have sorry ritual and then you have in the evening. 

You have that ritual that you're shutting down So you're again taking 30 minutes at the end of the day to do any final emails to get a dump of list of things for tomorrow and at the end you're Making a declaration that I've done from work for the day and you're shutting it down If you put these on both ends of your day, it accomplishes a few things. Number one is when you're going into the day, you are preparing yourself to be at your best because you know what's going to be right in front of you. 

You know what you need to focus on. And as an executive, things can be so distracting. You can be pulled in different directions and there can be escalations and different things. And you're constantly being asked to evaluate what is the most important. And if you have already done this work and you're consistently doing this work of, you know, what is important and urgent that I need to get done? 

Okay, that's urgent, but that's not important. Okay, delegate that, you know, this is actually not urgent or not important to, you know, the greater scheme of things. This just has a personal, um, you know, maybe it's something that's personal to somebody on the team or something else, but it's not really aligned with your larger goals. 

By being in the state every day where you're looking through and you're getting your head around that before you start your day, you're going to be much better equipped to manage all of the different flexibility. So This function of rituals is preparing mentally for the performance of each day. 

And that's essentially what you're doing as an executive. You want to go in there and perform your best every day to move the ball forward for the team. And when you optimize these, you can then start performing at a high level consistently over time. 

That is the goal of having these rituals built in so that a lot of these This is the skills that I'm giving you are core operating system functions that you need as an executive to make sure that you're constantly clearing out the cache that is your brain, that you are emptying that at the end of the day, that you are preparing for every day, you're ready and laser focused on what's going to happen. clearing out the noise, blocking your calendar, making sure that you can move from one thing to the next and continue to execute. These are the things that are going to have you commanding and operating at a high level. 

There's many studies that have shown that executives that are able to set good boundaries, manage their calendars and have These rituals set up report lower stress levels. And a lot of this stuff can increase your productivity by up to 50%. These are some studies being done on boundary setting and calendar blocking. All of this stuff is super, super effective. 

And these are the types of things that are going to move the ball forward for you. The result is you're going to become more balanced. Now let's not forget what's the fifth one. The fifth one is you gotta unplug. You have to make sure that there is a period of time in every single week, look at the week, that you can unplug. Then how do you actually create some of those moments every single day that you can really realistically unplug? And I think the easiest way to explain this is there's a very classic story of two lumberjacks. 

There were two lumberjacks that lived close to each other and one day they decided to have a wood chopping contest and they wanted to see that who could chop the most wood in an eight hour period. 

So lumberjack number one he goes at it and he is just chopping wood and he blows through the first hour he's going into the second hour and as he is going into hour number two he looks over and he sees Lumberjack number two at the end of the first hour take a break then, you know as he gets to our three lumberjack he looks over and he sees the Lumberjack at the end of our to take another break and this continues to go on all day where you know lumberjack one He took a little bit of time in the middle cram down some food, but he just chopped all day He said I'm just gonna chop my way through it where I? 

The lumberjack number two took breaks every hour and then he actually took a lunch break. And when they got to the end of the day, lumberjack number two had chopped almost twice as much wood as lumberjack number one. 

Lumberjack number one was amazed and asked Lumberjack number two, what exactly happened? You're taking these breaks all the time, what happened? How did you beat me? And Lumberjack two looked at him and he said, well, what you were calling a break, you probably didn't notice, but I was taking time and I was sharpening my axe. I was sharpening my axe. And as knowledge workers, our axe is our mind. We work with our mind, we're thinking machines. 

And if we're just grinding every day and we're putting ourselves in situations where we're not physically healthy, we're under mental and emotional duress, we're not going to be great for our teams or the people around us. This is why being able to completely unplug is so important and so critical. And all of these things that I've just walked you through, right? 

Setting the boundaries, managing up the calendar and time blocking, the startup shutdown ritual, and unplugging your mind, all of these things, the benefits of them are you're going to be able to be a very well-balanced professional. You're going to have a lot of skills in your toolbox that you're going to be able to execute with. 

You're going to find that you're going to manage your stress a lot better. You're going to be able to be more effective with your time and your daily focus and energy will go up. The one thing that I found in my career is that the more I took care of my physical health and my mental health, the more I showed up with my team, I brought more energy. I was able to be focused on what they needed, whether it was an emotional need, whether it was a intellectual need, whatever they needed to help them move forward, it made me much more effective. 

And these are the skills is where people ask me all the time, okay, Christopher, right now, you're in this lifestyle where you're, you know, I'm working on portfolio lifestyle, I'm working on my, you know, private equity, real estate investments, I'm creating content, I'm also writing a book. 

I'm also spending considerable amount of time with my family and my sons, helping them walk to manhood. How do you do all this stuff? How do you stay balanced? And I said, well, it's these skills, these, this executive skill set that I learned helped equip me for this portfolio lifestyle, helped equip me to be able to manage all these different things. And these are the core five skills that will help you too. So I'm going to take a quick break. 

And when I come back, I want to walk you through quickly. What are some steps that you can be doing with each one of these? so that you can start making progress forward today. Don't have to wait till tomorrow. 

Today, you can take some small steps, move forward and start being a much more effective executive. Be right back. Hi, welcome back to part two of five skills, five executive skills that they don't teach you in school. Yes, that is this episode here, Tech Careers and Money Talk. I want to walk through what are the steps to get you started today with some of these skills. 

So let's start with boundaries. Boundaries is number one. Start by what is your protected time? I think all of us need protected time before and after work. We need time to transition out of work. 

We need time to transition into work. And so set up some time. For myself, I'd always had when I got to, I'd say senior director and above, I protected five to seven at night, or it was depending on where I was and my travel, it could be six to eight. 

But just those two hours when I got home, I wanted to unwind, I wanted to be present with my family. And then I adopted a very focused morning routine, health routine, not a ritual, but a routine that, and I'm just saying that to differentiate, maybe they're both rituals, who knows, but where I got up and did some, you know, meditation, some journaling, some exercising, And I blocked that out from, you know, four to six a.m. is when is that was my time. 

That was my time with with away from my family, too, where I chose to get up early because I wanted to have that time for myself. You do a lot of surveys. You'll find that people who are really effective executives, they get up early and they get some time for themselves. 

May not be four a.m. or four thirty, but it could be early. The other thing I would recommend is set one or two 30-minute time blocks in the middle of the day that is just to take a walk and take a stroll. I started this on the advice of my manager, Doug Haar, who was the chief information officer when I was at Splunk, and I would just take a 30-minute walk. 

We had some phenomenal offices that were downtown, it was second and Brandon in San Francisco, and we could just go walking right there along the bay. And it was just such a nice, relaxing time, just 30 minutes, it was good for the body, move the mind, but setting some of those times. 

So that's defensive. So you can do that today, start setting out some blocks that that are your time, when you're going to make sure that that time is for you to either be present for your family, be present for your friends, your partner, or it's time where you're taking care of yourself. 

Maybe I know some people love doing an after work workout, but be defensive. On the offensive side, I would say go and make sure that you are putting when is the time that you're doing your deep work at work at a minimum start carving out some time that you want to be heads down laser focused and and make sure that you are able to complete that that is non-negotiable, that you're communicating to people around you, I need that time to be my best self. 

And you will find that if you can get three blocks of those a week, three blocks of two hours a week, like six hours of full focus time, you will get a ton accomplished. And again, all of this stuff, as you start moving this into position, You want to start partnering with people and helping them understand that you're going to be your best self. When you're able to get these things, when you're able to get this time away, when you're able to focus on yourself, you are going to be able to be better for the company. So that's number one, boundaries, setting your boundaries. Let's then go to managing up. So I would say do these three things. 

Number one, get time on your manager's calendar to meet and talk about that. I think too many people go into one-on-ones and they want to talk about themselves, but to start managing up, you need to like anything else. When you want to build trust with somebody. It starts with empathy. You need to understand them. You need to put yourself in their shoes, understand what they're going through. And when you do, this is going to start creating what I call this aligned leverage. Meaning, oh, my team, we're working on this project that's really important for your goals and also for your manager's goals. We're going to help you do that with excellence. 

We're going to help you do that on time and on budget. We're going to, you know, you start helping them that you're listening and you understand what's so important and you're helping them move things forward that are going to be part of their KPIs, part of their key performance indicators, part of their personal goals, maybe even some of their compensation metrics. 

I'm telling you, if you can help your manager achieve some of their goals and get more money in their pockets there, you would be surprised how much they're going to turn around and say, how much can I, how much more can I help you do the things that you need to do to be effective? 

And that's where this comes into play. right? When you have this strategy and this framework and saying, these are the things that I need to be effective, then you can create this aligned leverage to make that happen for yourself. So go get time, figure out what your team needs to do to help your manager, and then After you've done that, then you start articulating and weaving in what do you need to be successful? 

Or I'm making some changes here as you're listening and you've been giving and you've been empathizing first and foremost, that's when you can start weaving in your changes. Time blocking and calendar management. Now, this feeds off, I talked a little bit of the action items that you do in the boundary setting where you start blocking some things off. This is taking that to another level. If you've already blocked off what is your defensive time, meaning what is your time in the evening, in the morning for you, maybe some rest breaks in the middle. 

Some of the things that you can definitely do is make sure that you are putting on your calendar when you are doing specific work. I think the other thing you can do is start looking two weeks out. Get your calendar lined up so that you get into the habit of saying, how do I make sure that my calendar is rock solid for two weeks? And then you keep that rolling and ongoing. 

Because the more that you are aggressively managing your own calendar, putting in the defensive things that you need to do to take care of yourself, putting in all of the work that you're doing with your team and not, and even the time that you need to just be alone at your computer, that is going to make you much more effective as an executive. The other thing I think it's important to do, and this gets into time blocking, which is the time management system, is understanding how long it takes you to do certain things. So if you do have regular planning exercises, if you do have regular deliverables that you need to complete, block an hour, block 45 minutes, 30 minutes, and start tracking how long it takes you to complete certain items. 

This makes you more effective in a few ways, is you want to understand, are you improving when it comes to creating your deliverables? Is this framework that you're creating How much more effective is it making you? What do you have? Do you have more time for new things you can take on? Do you need to build new skills to help you be more efficient at things that you're doing? When you start tracking some of these things, that becomes really, really important as far as a metric for yourself of how you're taking use of that time. 

You know, and be honest, be honest with yourself, because we do know that you can get into some of these things. You can get into some tasks that you're doing, get bored. And the next thing, you know, Oh my gosh, I blocked out this time. And I spent 45 minutes watching YouTube videos, be honest with yourself and understand. Maybe you need to change the environment. 

Maybe you need to change the way that you work. Maybe you need to get an application that blocks off all of the other access to websites. So you can be doing deep. work. Very, very important, especially when it comes to time blocking calendar management. 

So when we think about this workday startup and shut down ritual, block out the time to do it. So that goes back to, again, the calendar management, the boundaries block out some time to say, here's where I'm going to start my day. And if you don't like, so right now, if you said, Christopher, I am slammed right now. I can't do both. Start with the end of day. That may sound counterintuitive. You may say, wait, what? Don't I want to start my day? 

No, I would actually start with the end of day. And I'll tell you, because if you do an end of day routine effectively, and you're doing a brain dump of what are all the things that came up today that you will need to organize, that you need to get done tomorrow, what are the things that you got done today? What are some of the priorities for tomorrow morning? And then you're able to put the pencil down and walk away. that's going to set you up for success the next morning. 

And so I would definitely recommend if you have to choose one of them, you can't get both started right away. I would definitely start with the end of day work routine. And this is where you want to just review everything that was done. You want to mark it complete. Move to tomorrow the things that have slid over that you didn't get done that you need to get done tomorrow. And always make sure that you're maintaining a really crisp priority list for yourself, for your team members. If you can read out and you know the priority on things and why they're important, and you can feel like you could walk in at any moment and deliver that to your manager, to your team. That's going to make you much more effective. Final 10 minutes, like hammer out things in your inbox, make sure you don't leave any sort of hanging threads. 

And Cal Newport, who talks a lot about this shutdown routine in his, he's got different videos and he may have even published a book on time blocking in his time management routine. 

He has a very physiological way that he shuts down the day is he stands up and says shut down complete and it's just a moment that he has shut down complete and he knows that he's done for the day and he walks he walks out and he's done that's his mic drop moment for me i i went back to my college days and i just say pencils down pencils down works better for me because i like to think of it as like time's up, like there is no more time in this day. 

I, you know, everybody like turn in your books, like it's done, like the assignments over, I can't come back to this, I have to wait till tomorrow. Because I'm trying to create these frameworks where I'm not creating outs for myself. I'm not creating opportunities for myself to keep sneaking back to the work. I want to make sure that I'm holding myself to the discipline that the day is done. 

I need to walk away from this work and I need to re-approach it tomorrow. Because I want to make sure that I have that hard line. Now, a startup routine, if you are able to do that, is you want to then review and make sure that you have top three priorities for a day. Any more than three priorities for a day, if it's something that you're responsible for, that can be really hard unless you're planning to work that day 12 or 14 hours. And sometimes we have to. 

I'm not trying to say that we don't do that. No, sometimes we are in a very out of balance and we need to get a lot of things done to meet our goals, to move these hyper growth company forward. So sometimes that is what we have to do. But review and get clear on your top three priorities. 

Then plan what time in your calendar you're gonna allocate to that. This is where this is all interrelated. This goes to the time blocking of, okay, I am now going to finish this routine or this ritual, and I'm going to go right into that. I'm going to go right into spending one hour on this. And I'm going to do 20 minutes, take a five minute break, do another 20 minutes, like whatever you need to do to be efficient and get that done. I'm going to go do it. I always take this time and I look, I would always review my meetings today and tomorrow and say, is there any noise? Are there meetings that are just busy? and opt out of those. 

This is again where people get really nervous. And I wish I would have gotten this coaching seven years earlier in my career, 10 years earlier, because the more you're able to speak into, I don't think that this meeting is going to really, I'm trying to think of how you say this tactfully, but it's like, I don't think I'm needed in this meeting. If you need me, help me, you know, you're reading back to them. Here's, here's the information I need and I can help make a decision or, or this, but you want to try and get out of those meetings where you're talking about work and you want to get to the meetings where you're doing work. 

And if you don't think that you're going to add value to a meeting, opting out of it is the right thing to do. It's the right thing to do for the company. There are some very expensive meetings going on in the workplace. What you want to do is you want to look around the room. 

You think of all of the you know, senior VPs, VPs, directors, or even principal engineers, or staff level engineers, or if there's a lot of senior people in the room, those meetings could be costing thousands of dollars an hour, you know, thousands of dollars a half an hour. So make sure that you take ownership of your time and you're managing it effectively and you are advocating just for good work. 

If you are able to create the framework where you can talk about work and what is effective, efficient work and what isn't, and why you have an opinion on why you don't need to be there, Eventually, you will push that discipline out to the organization. 

And the last one, number five, is you need to identify and find that time to unplug. If you really want to renew and you want to be your best and most effective self as an executive, you need to find this time. 

And it's different for everybody. It has to do with a lot of personal you know, things that are personal, that help you renew, that help you recharge. For myself, I found that Friday evening, right, generally speaking, there is, there's a global cycle when you are in these technology companies that grow up, and they do have a presence in the United States, and Europe and Africa, and then also Asia Pacific. there becomes this really beautiful time, like at the end of the day, Friday, until maybe people start coming online, you know, maybe Saturday or early Sunday, you can have Friday night and all day Saturday became this really important time that I realized I can be off the grid. I can be completely off the grid. And if I need to pick up and prepare for the work week, let me do that on Sunday afternoon. So this evolved into a set of rituals. So there's for our family, it's Friday night is pizza Friday, and movie night. 

So when I get to that finish line, whatever time that would be, sometimes with work, it would be, you know, 536, 630, get home, you're done for the week. It was pencils down. It was all done. 

Once I'm sitting there, getting ready to have the pizza, seeing the family around the dinner table and having nice conversation, week was over. It was done. And that's what worked for us. And then that rolled into then Saturday morning, getting up, not looking at any computer, not thinking about anything, but that became then my time with my kids. As my kids were young and we would go out, you know, take them out, get coffee in the morning, do some exercise, be outside. 

And that's continued to this day. I mean, that's been going on since, you know, we had our first son in 2012. And even before that, my wife and I were getting up and doing some walks and it just became Ritual wasn't pizza before we had the kids. It was really, you know, us actually going out and having a proper meal as adults out, but that will come back eventually. 

But how do you get to this point where you can not be thinking about work? You can be outside. You're not in front of a computer. You're not doing anything that involves technology. You're able to really rest that brain and get some renewal. I always encourage people that I coach to think about what are hobbies and activities. For myself, when I was early in my career, it was learning Spanish. And I would actually go to meetups where we would do language exchanges and maybe go out for food or maybe we'd go salsa dancing. 

But it was really trying to get out and experience other things in life. and leave this technology company, this technology lifestyle behind. And so what is that for you? What does that look like to be able to articulate and define a time during the week where you just unplug and you let it go?

Now that's evolved for me into a nightly pencils down. I'm not thinking about work. I'm trying to have engaging conversations with my family and really let that go. And you know, anything that has to do with work and that's taken time. It's not every night. It's not a perfect thing, but how can you, when you're in your tech career, start establishing these baselines? 

And then growing as your career grows, there should be the opportunity to expand some of these things because you'll understand how this balance starts being created of where you're getting this real rest and renewal that can then lead to being incredibly effective at work. So those are the five things. That's how to get started. I think setting healthy boundaries, go and take some time and start putting some boundaries in your calendar. 

Start putting those boundaries in your life, you know, put down the technology, go and find some time to get focused, renew and do those things for yourself. manage up. This is strategically going to set you up to be able to have your career ascend and also just again staying aligned and making sure that you're doing the things that are most important for yourself and for the company. calendar and time blocking. 

If you can master this, this will be a skill that will help you expand the capacity of what you can do, because you're getting very focused on what you're spending your time doing, getting very crisp with that. 

And then you're also trying to optimize that you're trying to be able to produce something in a shorter amount of time, which is going to you're essentially what you're doing is up leveling your skill. 

What you're doing is you're moving from skill to expertise. This will follow you. And then you want to have a start up and shut down ritual. And again, this is something that around your work, how do you start and get ready for your work day every single day? And then how do you shut down and have that shut down complete pencils down moment so that you're done and you're mentally checked out and you're getting your brain reset and starting on the recovery so that you're ready for the next day. Then there's unplugging regularly. 

How do you make time for yourself to sharpen the axe? I know that there was a lot of value in that for you. I'd be interested to understand which one was most interesting. So please feel free to send me an email at Ask at techcareersandmoneytalk.com. Thank you so much for joining us this week. And again, we do have a newsletter, Tech Careers and Money News, where we're breaking down these frameworks, giving you more actionable tips that help you grow your career, build wealth, and make an impact. So please join us there. We'll see you next week. Thank you. Goodbye.