From Russ Henneberry, Founder of theCLIKK:

It’s perfectly OK to have either one of these schedules:

But for so many of us, the trouble starts when we need to somehow manage both of these schedules at the same time.

A Director’s day is diced into small pieces, like 30-to-60 minute increments. A Doer’s day needs long chunks of uninterrupted time to make things happen.

I remember the day I realized I was doing both: managing people and projects (the Director) AND executing on a lot of those projects (the Doer). It’s not a mistake to attempt this, but it’s much harder without some hard-won discipline.

Here are some things I’ve learned:

• Block out entire days (or at least parts of days) with zero meetings and long chunks of time to get things done.
• If a meeting can’t be avoided on a Doer day, schedule it super-early or super-late in the day to avoid interrupting long chunks of Doer time. Putting a 30-minute meeting at 10 AM is like putting a speed bump in the middle of a Formula 1 race.
• Take communication channels very seriously. Is a meeting required, or would it be better to set up a Slack channel and Trello board where stakeholders can provide updates and be done with it? (Side note: it’s usually a bad idea to try to manage projects by email.)

Get more from theCLIKK