How I organized my time as a full-time CTO
My calendar is already full 😱 this is how I included many other side initiatives!
Intro
I was a full-time CTO/VP at Zorion for 2 years, from November 2022 to October 2024. I started there as a VP of Engineering and then got promoted to CTO a couple of months after.
At the same time, I was also writing this newsletter, doing podcast appearances, speaking at events, coaching and other initiatives.
This is an article for paid subscribers, and here is the full index:
- My role as a CTO
- I’ve separated my time into manager and maker time
🔒 This is how my calendar looked like
🔒 We had fixed time for alignment meetings inside our cross-functional team
🔒 As an engineering leader, I strongly believe that focusing on your personal brand is mandatory
🔒 This is how I included time for LinkedIn on a daily basis
🔒 How I reserved my time to write a newsletter every week
🔒 The calendar is already full! Where to include other initiatives like teaching a course, coaching and advising + events and podcasts
My role as a CTO
I led a cross-functional team of 6-7 people and we were 15 altogether in the company. If I would pick my top 3 responsibilities, that would be:
Making sure that the tech is aligned with the business.
Making sure that we have a great process in place that we consistently deliver new increments.
Making sure that we are building a stable, usable app that our users love to use.
My daily responsibilities were heavily aligned with making sure we were achieving these things.
I consider myself a good generalist that can if needed go into details of a certain part. Being a generalist, I am automatically looking to have experts on my team.
So what I did → I was a mix of being a manager and an engineer.
I aligned everything that we were doing with the business, simplifying and aligning goals for us and managing expectations, facilitating and leading meetings and having 1:1 meetings with my team.
At the same time, I was working on different projects, like building the administration application, improving the SEO of the website, doing technical specifications, doing performance optimizations, code reviews, building proof of concepts, etc.
I’ve separated my time into manager and maker time
In order to be productive in our industry, you need longer focus hours.
And that’s why organizing your time properly is very important. If you don’t manage your time, others will manage it for you and you’ll get nothing tangible done throughout the day because you are context-switching all the time.
I’ve dedicated specific blocks of time to focus times and the rest to manager times where people could book meetings with me.
The separation was around 60% manager time and 40% maker time. Of course, not every week was the same, because it really depended on what is going to be the best for the business and what will provide the biggest impact.
My impact radar was always turned on and I was constantly re-evaluating whether I was spending my time in the most valuable way possible.