F2F #19: Design your day
Here's a good way to re-claim your day, your schedule and your life.
Many times I have written about the concept of how we're drawn to other people's agendas and how little control we have over our own. Most likely, the former causes the latter.
Instead of being proactive, we tend to assume that everyone else's priorities are more important than ours.
"Oh, this person sent me a document for my review. I have to do it", "I have loads of whatsapp messages to reply to" or "I receive too many emails from people".
Well, excuse me? Why are their priorities stomping on yours? Why are you devaluating yourself constantly?
A few years ago, I wrote Are you really working on what matters? Get off everyone else's wishlist on the MarsBased blog, one of my most famous articles of all time, as a reminder of what shouldn't be done. At the time of writing it, I had realised that I was spending almost my entire day doing stuff for others, not for myself, thus eliminating my feelings of self-fulfillment and basically never getting the sensation of having done anything substantial during my day.
The first step is to admit it. Make a conscious effort of assessing how much time do you spend pleasing others (and whether they deserve it) and how much time do you spend working on meaningful stuff getting you closer to your goals.
The second step is designing your days. In 2020, I wrote How I distribute my days to run two companies, based on the famous Jack Dorsey schedule to run Twitter and Square as a CEO at the same time. For about four years, I've adhered to a schedule I designed consciously, and I have been pretty diligent about.
For instance, my Wednesdays were devoted to growth, and they would look like this:
- Review social media (15 min).
- Review Linear notifications (15 min).
- Write blog post (90 min).
- Work on ONE task for the website (30 min).
- Review next week's newsletter (15 min).
And I'd leave the remaining time for meetings and serendipity. Of course, it's hard to follow this schedule strictly but if you do it 80% of the time, you're good.
Now, in 2025, things have changed, and the weekly schedule I devised years ago doesn't cut it for me any more: I've quit Startup Grind, I've shut down a few projects and am required to spend more time in sales than in marketing. Also, back then, we didn't have our podcasts.
Updating the schedules is also critical to your mission, even more than actually following them. Time and again I've fallen into the trap of blindly following my schedule without reevaluating whether it was still valid or not, and this is a highly expensive mistake.
The main goal for me has changed. Whereas years ago my main goal was to maintain two companies at the same time balanced, MarsBased and Startup Grind Barcelona, now my focus is 100% on growing MarsBased. I won't do tasks that don't contribute to growing the company. I'll have to delegate, automate or cancel altogether those that don't move the needle.
Right now, I'm in the process of redesigning my week so I put my priorities in front of everything else. I will share my schedule as soon as I have it - ideally next week.
Recommended stuff
- 🎙️ Basecamp's Hire when it hurts - agree with it fully. Slow hiring has been an extremely effective method for us to ensure we hired the right people and to keep them around for longer, but be flexible with exceptions and hire exceptional talent in exceptional times ahead of time.
- 🧵 Naval Ravikant's timeless "how to get rich (without getting lucky)" twitter thread.
- 📝 Paul Graham's "The origin of woke" dispels many many misconceptions about the term.
- 📲 Victoriano Izquierdo's CalmDigest to turn articles into kindle-ready content to read before bed.
- 💰 After many years using it on a personal level, I've now stepped up and opened an Indexa Capital account for MarsBased to get a better return for our money. Use my affiliate link to open yours.
- 👨🏻💻 I use TeamBlind to follow up on tech gossip and see what I'm joyously missing out on.
My projects
- 🚀 MarsBased:
- We're ecstatic to have signed a contract with RCR Arquitectes to build their new platform.
- Also extremely happy about having extended our contract with the Everesting folks after a successful first phase, which involved developing their corporate website.
- We've launched our first event for 2025, the Corporate Innovation Summit. Tickets are already on sale!
- This year's Talent Arena at MWC 2025 is also our project, for the second year in a row.
- 🎙️ Foc a Terra:
- We have dedicated a monographic on Sam Altman, last week (in Catalan).
- We're currently looking for a new sponsor for the show. Reach out if interested (thousands of downloads per episode in the first week, right now and more live events coming up).
- 💵 Investments:
Asks
- Jan 23rd, I'm speaking at Startup Grind Mataró. Come say hi.
- Give me feedback about the newsletter in general. Like it? No likey?