Time Management Strategies

The CEO’s Calendar... My Ultimate Guide to Stop Juggling and Start Winning at Time Management

Hello, and welcome.

Let me paint you a picture. It’s 6 a.m. and your phone is already glowing with notifications. Before your feet hit the floor, you’ve answered three "urgent" emails from your international supplier. Your first coffee is interrupted by a series of back-to-back Zoom calls that could have been an email. You spend your afternoon putting out operational fires, get home late, and then, finally, at 9 p.m., you open your laptop to start the "real" work—the strategic thinking you were meant to do all day.

You finally fall into bed, exhausted, telling yourself this is the price of success. The hustle. The grind. You are so busy.

I want to tell you, with all the conviction I have, that this is a lie.

This isn't success. It's survival. And it’s unsustainable. Being constantly “busy” is not a badge of honour; it’s a symptom of a broken system. It’s a sign that you are letting your day, your business, and ultimately your life, happen to you, rather than for you.

For years, as I built RedBalloon from my living room into a household name, and now as co-founder of Big Red Group, overseeing a portfolio of leading brands like Adrenaline and Experience Oz, the single most powerful asset I’ve had to cultivate is not capital or contacts. It's my command over my own 24 hours.

I’ve learned that you cannot manage time. It passes at the exact same, relentless pace for every single person on this planet. What you can manage—what you must manage—is your energy, your focus, your decisions, and your priorities.

This philosophy is so fundamental to effective leadership that I dedicated an entire episode of my podcast to it, exploring the deep connection between how you command your schedule and how you build your personal brand.

Today, I want to give you my ultimate guide. We’re going beyond simple "hacks." We’re building a new operating system for how you approach your time, your work, and your life.

The Foundation - Identify Your "Big Rocks" and Build Your Fortress

The late, great Stephen Covey gave us the perfect analogy: the jar of life. If you have a large glass jar, a pile of big rocks, a pile of pebbles, and a pile of sand, how do you fit it all in? The answer is simple. You must put the Big Rocks in first. If you start with the sand (the trivial tasks, the endless emails, the low-value interruptions), you will never have room for the rocks—the things that truly matter.

As a leader, your primary job is to identify and prioritise your Big Rocks. These are the needle-moving, high-impact activities that create genuine, long-term value. They are not "answer emails" or "attend meetings." They are "Secure our Series A funding," "Develop and launch our new flagship product," or "Hire a world-class CTO."

How to implement this with surgical precision:

1. Define Your Rocks on Three Horizons:
   • Yearly Rocks: At the start of the year, define the 3-5 overarching strategic goals for the business. These are your North Star.
   • Quarterly Rocks: Break down the yearly goals into 90-day priorities. What are the 3-5 critical objectives we must achieve this quarter to stay on track?
   • Weekly Rocks: Every Monday morning, look at your Quarterly Rocks and ask: "What are the 1-3 most important things I can do this week to move those objectives forward?"
2. Make Your Calendar a Fortress: Your calendar is not a public suggestion box; it is a strategic weapon. Once you’ve identified your weekly Big Rocks, they go into your calendar first. Block out two-to-three-hour chunks of "deep work" time to focus exclusively on them. I colour-code these blocks in my calendar. They are sacred. They are non-negotiable. Everything else—the pebbles and sand—must fit into the remaining space. This simple act transforms you from being reactive to being fiercely proactive.

The Art of Leverage - Stop Doing the $10 an Hour Work

I saw this time and time again in the Shark Tank. A brilliant founder would pitch a multi-million-dollar idea and then, under questioning, reveal they were still spending hours a week personally packing shipping boxes or manually creating social media posts.

When you are starting out with nothing, you do everything. It’s a rite of passage. But to scale, you must evolve from being a "doer" to being a "director." You must relentlessly delegate, outsource, and automate.

Think about it this way: calculate what an hour of your time is worth when you're working on the business (strategy, innovation, key partnerships). Let's say it's $500 or $1,000. Now, what is the market rate for bookkeeping, customer service emails, or data entry? Maybe $30 an hour. Every hour you spend on a $30 task, you are not saving the company $30; you are costing it the $970 of value you failed to create.

Your Action Plan for Effective Leverage:

• The Delegation Audit: For one week, keep a detailed log of how you spend your time. At the end of the week, take three different coloured highlighters and categorize every task:
  1. Green: Tasks only you can do (your zone of genius).
  2. Yellow: Tasks that could be trained and delegated to someone on your team.
  3. Red: Tasks that could be easily outsourced to a freelancer or automated with software.
     Your goal is to eliminate the red and drastically reduce the yellow, freeing you up to live in the green.
• Embrace Automation: We live in an age of incredible tools. Use them. Scheduling software like Calendly can eliminate the back-and-forth of finding a meeting time. Project management tools like Asana or Trello can provide clarity on who is doing what. Accounting software like Xero can automate invoicing. Every manual, repetitive process in your business is a candidate for automation.
• Overcome the "Delegation Fear": The biggest barrier to delegation is often emotional. We think, "It's faster if I just do it myself," or "No one can do it as well as me." This is a trap. The first time you delegate, it will take longer because you have to train someone. But you are not just investing that time to get one task done; you are investing it to free yourself from that task forever. Let go of perfectionism. A task done to 80% by someone else is infinitely better than a task done to 100% by you, because it frees you to work on something of much higher value.

Energy Management - The Real Secret to Productivity

A perfectly structured calendar is useless if you show up to your "Big Rock" time slot feeling drained and distracted. High performance is not about managing a clock; it's about managing your personal energy.

We are humans, not computers. Our capacity for deep focus, creativity, and strategic thought ebbs and flows throughout the day. The secret is to align your most important work with your peak energy cycles.

I am a classic morning person. My brain is firing on all cylinders between 8 a.m. and midday. This is my protected "deep work" zone. I don't check emails. My phone is on silent. I don't take meetings. I am focused on my Big Rocks. Conversely, I know I hit a natural slump mid-afternoon. That’s when I schedule my "shallow work"—clearing my inbox, returning routine phone calls, or reviewing documents that don't require intense creative horsepower.

Design Your High-Energy Day:

• Discover Your Chronotype: Are you a "lark" (morning person), an "owl" (night person), or somewhere in between? Track your energy levels for a week to find your natural peaks and troughs. Be honest with yourself and structure your day accordingly. Don't fight your biology; work with it.
• Think in Energy Buckets: Your productive energy is not just mental. It's a combination of four buckets:
  • Physical: Are you sleeping enough, eating well, and moving your body?
  • Emotional: Are you connecting with people who lift you up? Are you finding moments of joy?
  • Mental: Are you giving your brain time to rest and recharge, or are you in a constant state of information overload?
  • Spiritual: Are you connecting with your purpose? Do you have time for reflection?
    Running on empty in any of these buckets will cripple your overall effectiveness. Schedule time for the gym, for family dinner, for a walk in nature, with the same seriousness you schedule a board meeting.

Taming the Digital Beasts - Meetings and Email

For many entrepreneurs, the two biggest drains on time and energy are the inbox and the meeting room. You must build strict systems to control them, or they will control you.

My Rules for Email:

1. Don't Live in Your Inbox: Your inbox is a list of other people's priorities, not yours. Turn off notifications.
2. Batch Process: Designate two or three specific times per day to check and process email. I do it late morning and end of the day.
3. Touch It Once: For every email, make an immediate decision: Archive it (if no action is needed), Reply to it (if it takes less than two minutes), Delegate it to the right person, or turn it into a Task in your project management system to be prioritised later. The goal is to get to "inbox zero" after each session.

My Rules for Meetings:

1. No Agenda, No Meeting: If the organiser hasn't sent a clear agenda with the desired outcomes, I politely decline until they do. This one rule will eliminate half of your useless meetings.
2. Question the Guest List: Is every single person in this meeting absolutely essential for a decision to be made? If not, remove them. Respect their time.
3. Default to 30 Minutes: The default one-hour meeting is a relic. Challenge yourself to solve the problem in 30 minutes. You’ll be amazed how often you can.

How Your Time Management Defines Your Personal Brand

This is where all these strategies converge to create something much bigger than an efficient schedule. Your calendar is the single most honest reflection of your priorities, and therefore, the foundation of your personal brand.

You can say you value innovation, but if your calendar is filled with micromanagement and administrative meetings, your brand is not "innovator"; it's "firefighter." You can say you value your team, but if you consistently show up late to their meetings, your brand is not "respectful leader"; it's "disorganised."

Every time you protect your deep work time, you are branding yourself as strategic. Every time you delegate effectively, you are branding yourself as a leader who trusts their team. Every time you say a polite but firm "no" to a request that derails your priorities, you are branding yourself as focused and purposeful.

In the podcast episode, my Big Red Group co-founder David Anderson and I do a tactical breakdown of this very concept. We discuss how to perform a "time and brand audit," looking at your calendar and asking the tough question: "If a stranger saw how I spent my last week, who would they think I am, and what would they think I value?" It’s a powerful exercise in self-awareness.

If you are ready to align your actions with your ambitions, I urge you to listen to this episode: Managing Time and Personal Branding.

From Time Manager to Life Architect

Mastering your time is not about squeezing more tasks into your day. It’s about creating more space for what truly matters. It’s about moving from a life of frantic, reactive busyness to one of calm, intentional focus. It’s the difference between running on a hamster wheel and building an empire.

It’s about making conscious choices. The choice to protect your focus. The choice to empower your team. The choice to guard your energy. The choice to say "no" so you can say a bigger "yes" to your most important goals.

These aren't just tips; they are pillars of a new way of operating. Build your fortress, learn the art of leverage, manage your energy, and tame the digital beasts. This is how you stop juggling and start winning. This is how you architect not just a successful business, but a life you love.

Now, I want to hear from you. What is your single biggest time management challenge, or what is the one strategy that has changed the game for you? Share your thoughts in the comments below. Let’s learn from each other.

Until next time,

Naomi