how to manage your time like a CEO

The highest performing CEOs I know work fewer hours than you, and they're getting 10 times more done. Now, I know that sounds backwards. You've probably been told that the harder you grind, the further you get, that more hours equals more output, that the founder who answers Slack at midnight is the founder who wins. But that's all wrong. And I'm gonna prove it to you right now. I've built three companies from the ground up. I've coached thousands of founders, people doing anywhere from $50,000 a month to $3 million a month. And for years, I was right there with you, right? 14 hour days, feeling productive, but getting almost nothing done that actually mattered. What I figured out and what I'm gonna share with you today are five habits that helped me stop being the bottleneck and take back my time and focus on work I actually love doing, stuff that fires me up. By the end of this video, you're gonna have a completely different relationship with your calendar, a new way of thinking about your team and a system that top CEOs use to do less and scale faster because of it. And I put together a quick CEO time leverage audit you can use to apply in your own business after watching this video to locate where you may be the bottleneck. Let's get into it. Habit one, time multipliers. Here's the thing that nobody tells you about hiring. Most founders hire as a panic button. They get overwhelmed, they bring someone on and they feel better for about two weeks. And then they realize that they've created more overhead, more culture risk and honestly just more management work than before. I call this the founder prison and freedom requires a completely different way of thinking about your team. It was about 14 years ago into building my first company where I remember sitting at my desk on a Sunday and feeling completely underwater. I had a team, I had revenue coming in by every outside measure, things were going well but I was more stressed out than ever in my life. More in the weeds, more reactive and I couldn't figure out why. And then it hit me. I had been hiring to relieve pressure instead of hiring to create leverage. I'd bring someone on whenever I felt like I was drowning and instead of getting lighter I just felt like I got more to manage, more context to share, more questions to answer, more culture to protect. The moment I started really focusing on hiring for ROI everything changed. So every founder I've coached who makes this shift says the same thing. It's like someone lifts a weight off their shoulders that they didn't even know that they were carrying. The business feels lighter, the decisions feel cleaner and for the first time you start to feel like the owner of your business instead of some employee inside of it. That's a shift and here's how you can actually make it. Every person you bring onto your team should hit one specific number. They don't hit it, you're not ready to hire. And that number again is return on investment. And so to make this concrete, you really need to focus on well what is that one thing they need to hit? Say you go and you bring on a social media manager at $5,000 a month. They save you 30 hours a week in content creation and distribution, that's 120 hours a month returned back to you. Now think about what your time is actually worth as a CEO. Even if your effective hourly rate is $2,000 an hour, the revenue potential from those 120 reclaimed hours is significant. We're talking $240,000. And so when you stack enough high ROI hires together and pair them then with the right systems, that's when things really start to compound. I have a founder who I've been helping for the last three years and he's automated 95% of his business by building the right team and applying this delegation framework properly. Now he spends entire summers with his family, not checking Slack at dinner, not stepping out for meetings. I mean like actually present. Here's the deeper layer though. That math only holds up if you hire the right person. One A player is worth 20 B players. A players are gonna return leverage, B players just accumulate debt. Before your next hire, run the delegation math. Trust me, you will save yourself so much time and headaches. Time saved per month multiplied by your hourly rate. Subtract the annual hire costs. If the ROI isn't at least 5X, restructure that role or just hold off entirely. And once you're ready to hire, rank your candidates based on ROI. Make the highest ROI hires first. You know, most founders can properly recruit, onboard and integrate about two people per month without damaging their culture. But here's the thing, the best founders don't stop at hiring. That's where habit two comes in and this one genuinely changed how I think about team building. Habit two, automation first. Before you hire the next person to solve a problem, there's a question you have to ask. Can this be automated? I was talking to Oren Hoffman a few years ago and he completely rewired how I think about teams when he said something that stopped me cold and that I haven't been able to shake out of my mind since. He said, Matt, hiring is a mark of failure. I was like, failure? Really? I thought hiring meant you were growing and it was great that you're adding to your team. His point was this, right? If you're creating a new role, it means you failed to automate it first. Now we're at an extraordinary inflection point right now. AI tools can handle engineering tasks, content production, customer service workflows, research, scheduling, distribution and virtually every piece of grunt work in your business. Using Cloud alone has helped me produce content and frameworks that would have taken an agency weeks to generate. You know, the tools are there today. Most founders just haven't reorganized their thinking around them yet. What Elon Musk does better than almost any other operator is his four-step algorithm for building companies. And I think every founder should have this in their head. Step one, you're gonna find the limiting constraint in the operation. Step two is to eliminate everything unnecessary around it. Step three is to simplify what remains down to its most essential form. Step four is to automate what you can. Only after all four steps would you ever go and consider making that next new hire. If your team's default answer to every problem is we should go and hire someone, there's a cultural sign that they aren't pushing hard enough on simplicity, automation first and taking extreme ownership over problems. Run through four questions, okay? In this exact order to help go and level up your company. One, what exactly needs to happen here? Two, does it all actually need to happen at all? Three, can AI or a system or automation handle it? Four, can an existing team member then absorb it? Only after working through all four should a hire even be on the table and build this expectation inside your team. Can we automate this? Always comes before, should we hire for this? Now, even with the right team and the right systems, there's one thing you still have to perfect. And this is where most founders lose. Habit three, founder flow. Why do some founders accomplish more in two hours than others do in an entire week? It comes down to this one habit and it took me way too long to figure out. 17 years back, I had a pattern that was slowly destroying my momentum. I'd wake up, I'd check my phone, look at social media, fire off some responses, jump on a morning call. By the time I had three minutes to actually think, I was already drained and my mind was scattered. I'd look at my task list at 7 p.m. and practically nothing had moved at all. I'd tell myself I'd handle it that night, but then 8 p.m. rolls around and you're just absolutely cooked. And before I know it, it's 9 p.m. and the same critical tasks are just sitting there untouched. I know you, right? A lot of founders are living this right now and just calling it a busy season, but it's not a busy season, it's a trap. And financially, this is the smartest thing you can figure out as a founder. Every day you spend entirely in reactive mode is a day you didn't build the thing that compounds. It's a day you didn't write the framework, you didn't go and rejig your offer, didn't create the amazing exceptional content that would have worked for you while you slept. The cost is invisible in the moment, but it stacks up enormously over time. I read the book, Deep Work, Maybe You Have Too by Cal Newport. And Newport's argument is that the most valuable economic output in today's world comes almost from distraction-free, cognitively intense work. I call this founder flow. For a CEO, founder flow is worth thousands of dollars an hour. The slack replies, the quick questions, the just two seconds of your time, those requests, that's $5 an hour work. And most founders are putting in 12 hours on $5 stuff. And then wondering why the high leverage stuff never gets done. Here's what founder flow actually looks like in practice. I use my founder flow to write a full 21 day email course and build out an AI course curriculum. And I did it just in two days. That's work that would take most teams weeks. That's the difference. Two days versus two weeks. And the only variable was protected, uninterrupted creative time. Block four hours in your calendar tomorrow morning. Not afternoon, not whenever it's convenient, morning, first thing. If you have a family, school runs, a team pinging you before 9 a.m., well, just go and wake up a little earlier. Trust me, it's one of those things, just try it out for 60 days. But guarding your morning is just the beginning. The founders who really break through, they go one layer deeper. And that's habit four. And look, if your business brings in six to seven figures a month or more right now, and the reactive days, the stolen mornings, the feeling that your calendar runs you instead of the other way around. And if that hits close to home, I built something specifically for that. It's called FounderOS Velocity. And I wanna be clear about what it is. It's not some course. It's not a done for you agency. It's the exact operating infrastructure I use to run a portfolio of high margin cash flowing companies. I've opened it up to just a small group of serious founders. Here's what you actually get. You get weekly strategy sessions directly with me, access to my full C-suite, the operators who help me run everything behind the scenes at my personal media company, AI tools built on my systems that execute for you around the clock, a vetted talent bench so you can make the right hires fast without the guesswork, and a tight-knit community of founders building the same way that you wanna build. If that sounds like what you need right now, you can go and apply via the link in the description. We only take founders who are a genuine fit. So if you're ready to stop being the bottleneck, then go and apply, and someone on my team will get back to you within just a few hours. Okay, habit four. This one is about the single most dangerous word in a founder's vocabulary. Habit four, the not-to-do list. This next habit will feel wrong at first. Saying no to a good opportunity, I get it, it can feel terrible, but saying yes to a bad one, that pain is physical, and that loss is real. As a founder, you already know you need to train your eyes for a good opportunity, but what most founders forget is that you also need to train your eye for the bad ones. It makes sense, right? But every opportunity looks like it could be the one. All the time, right, you can find things that all sound useful, right? I've gone to events, though. You spend six to eight hours in a room with genuinely interesting people, and then you just come home and think, I should have just worked and stayed in because I knew what I needed to get done. The problem is never a lack of new ideas. It was a lack of executing the ones that you already have. Gary Keller put it this way. What's the one thing you could do such that by doing it, everything else becomes easier or unnecessary? So here's your action step. Write out everything on your plate right now, every single item, then ask yourself, what is the 4% of this list that's gonna drive me 64% of the actual impact? Clear out the rest, set your default answer to no, and protect the few things that actually matter. And if you genuinely don't know what your highest leverage activity is yet, well, congratulations, you just found your first high leverage activity to focus on, figuring that out. So far, everything we've covered has been about doing less of the wrong things. This last habit though is gonna flip it. It's about doing more of the one thing that only you can do. Habit five, design your icky guy. Every founder eventually looks up and realizes they've built a business that owns them instead of the other way around. The ones who took back control did one specific thing differently. About eight years ago, if I'd looked at a breakdown of my week, most of it was going towards things that other people on my team could have done better than me. Tech builds, funnel setups, automations, operations. I was busy, genuinely busy, but on the wrong things. The moment I finally sat down and asked, what are the things that will actually move the needle? Everything changed, and I started to restructure my entire business. For me, those things are building communities, you know, growing distribution through organic content, designing frameworks that simplify how founders operate, and writing. This is my zone of brilliance. Everything outside of that, it needs to be delegated, automated, or eliminated. And there's a Japanese concept called icky guy that maps this out exactly. There's four core questions. What do you love? What are you genuinely exceptional at? What does the world need? And what can you be paid for? The intersection of those four areas is your icky guy, or as I call it, your zone of brilliance. I want you to understand this. The goal isn't to own a niche. The goal is to become the niche. Now think about someone like Tim Ferriss. He didn't build a brand like as a productivity expert. He built a brand around his own curiosity and his obsessions, right? And he's built an amazing 20-year career, openly sharing whatever genuinely just fascinates him, even when it didn't fit into some category. My own epiphany came when I started thinking about myself this similar way and more as an investor. I had actually discovered Carl Icahn in this documentary, Icahn on HBO. Carl Icahn, this famous investor at the time, owned about 12% of Apple. He didn't go and operate inside of his companies, right? He manages them as this asset manager. And the moment I started seeing myself as more of this asset manager, a portfolio manager, my businesses and my mindset changed. Look at every founder who left a real mark. Jobs had product obsession. Buffett has capital allocation. Tim Ferriss has the deconstruction of mastery. And when you become the niche, your business stops defining you, you start defining your business. Work becomes this creative expression. Growth becomes your life. And that's what makes it sustainable. That's what makes it fun. So here's what I want you to do right now. Write down the things you do where you lose track of time, even amid all the daily fires. Then write down the activities that genuinely move the needle in your business. The overlap between those two lists, that's where your work should live. Anything outside of that zone, delegate it, automate it, or eliminate it. Protect that intersection obsessively. I think that this exercise is the highest returning asset you can build. Here's the truth. Most founders are stuck on a treadmill, working harder, hiring more, and burning out faster. Wondering why the effort isn't showing up in the numbers. These five habits are how the top 1% get off that treadmill entirely. None of this is complicated, but all of it requires a decision. If you're serious about this, don't just watch this video and move on. Download the CEO Time Leverage audit below. It will help you go and filter your entire week into CEO work, transferable work, and unleveraged work. You'll calculate exactly how many hours you're misallocating and quantify what's costing you annually. So once you complete that, go and book a call with my team. We're gonna look at your CEO gap, identify the structural constraint, and show you what it would look like to redesign your role so you're operating as a true CEO. You have one shot at this, one life, one calendar, one version of the business you're building. Don't waste it being the bottleneck in your own story. And if you wanna see how I design the most beautiful business ever that follows all of these rules, watch this next video. Thanks so much for watching. Welcome to the Founder Freedom Movement. Be sure to like and subscribe, and I'll see you in the next one.