Mismatched Socks

ryanleecarson:

I find it a constant battle to keep my priorities straight. There’s always 100+ things pulling at my attention and if I’m not super-focused, I end up working on stuff that doesn’t matter.

My top three priorities are …

1. Spending quality, focused time with my family and friends - Having good relationships is what makes me ultimately happy
2. Leading Treehouse to success - I’m the Founder/CEO and I’m insanely passionate about our Mission
3. Staying healthy physically and mentally - Now that I’ve gotten healthy, I’m much happier, so I want to continue to make this a priority.

Here’s my strategy

I divide Monday to Thursday (we work a 4-day week at Treehouse) into the four main areas of the business:

1. Monday: Product - I spend time using Treehouse and sending bugs and ideas to the Product Team. I then research other products and competitors and use their products to get ideas. I also meet with the Product Team to check progress on our Road Map and discuss ideas and problems.
2. Tuesday: Video & Teaching - I meet with the Leaders of the Video and Teaching Teams at Treehouse to discuss video output and any problems they’re having. I also spend time thinking about our Teaching methodology and how we can help our Members learn more effectively.
3. Wednesday: HR, Culture and Finance - I meet with our Financial Controller to discuss our P&L, Balance Sheet and Cashflow. I then spend time thinking about things we can do to maintain our culture (the Zappos Culture Book is a great source of inspiration). I also check that HR tasks are being taken care of like on-boarding new staff, legal stuff, Level Ups, etc.
4. Thursday: Marketing & Sales - I meet with our VP Sales and Marketing/Ad Manager and see how they’re doing. Sales: We discuss growing the Sales Team, how to tackle objections from potential customers and who we could sell to next. Marketing: We go over CPAs, conversion rates, AB tests, landing pages, SEO and more.

Managing todos

I use Asana for managing all my personal and work todo lists. It’s free and easy to use, so I’d highly recommend it. It’s run by a solid team, has loads of cash in the bank ($9m+ in funding) and is constantly being updated - so I feel safe putting ‘my life’ inside it.

Here’s my daily routine …

1. Wake up at 4:54am
2. Have a small snack to start my metabolism
3. Jump in front of my iMac and get rocking …
4. Open up Asana and go to ‘My Tasks’. This has everything that I’ve assigned to myself divided into …
   1. Inbox - To be filed
   2. Today - Things I’ve marked to be done today
   3. Upcoming - Everything I want do next
   4. Later - A bucket for stuff to do eventually but isn’t urgent
5. Sort by ‘Date’ to see if there’s anything urgent I need to put on the Today list
6. Categorize anything in ‘Inbox’ as Today, Upcoming or Later
7. Go through ‘Upcoming’ and put things on the Today list that need to be done
8. Check Google Calendar and look what today’s focus is for the business (see above). I then add items to the Today list accordingly
9. Add any meetings (including going to the gym) to the Today list and tag them as ‘Meeting’. The reason why I do this is because they take valuable time up and when I finish a meeting, I want to be able to check something off my list to give me the mental satisfaction of completing something. This is especially important as you hire more people and your job becomes mainly meeting/talking with people.
10. Go through our Treehouse ‘Road Map’ project in Asana and make sure the Team is actively working on the top priority items
11. Prioritize my Today list by putting the most important things at the top
12. Knock out 1-3 things on my Today list
13. Check email (notice how this is the 13th thing I do, not the first)
14. Add things to my todo list based on email and try to clear important or urgent email
15. 6:50am - Kids wake up so I head upstairs with a cup of coffee for Gill and I to enjoy in bed while the kids run around for 40 minutes
16. 7:30am - 9:00am - Breakfast, showers and preparing the kids for their day
17. 9:00am - 10:15am - Cranking through my todo list or doing meetings
18. 10:15am - 11:45am (Mon, Tues, Thur) - Cycling to/from gym and doing workout
19. 11:45am - 6:00pm - Cranking through my todo list and doing meetings
20. 6:00pm - Leave my iMac and help put the kids down (or cook dinner)
21. 7:15pm - Dinner with Gill
22. 8:00pm - 9:30pm - Hang out with Gill (talk, watch TV, do family logistics, read, call family and friends, etc)
23. 9:30pm - Go to sleep

I work at home so I’m fortunate to not have any commute time.

Friday - Sunday we don’t have a set schedule. It’s just time to spend time with the family and friends and do house maintenance. I try hard not to carry my iPhone around so I don’t get sucked in to work.

So there you have it. I’d love to hear how you guys manage your todo lists, priorities and schedules.

This is brilliant — GTD simplified. Just the inspiration I needed to do a bit of reorganizin’ m’self