11 August 2023

CEOs Reveal What Makes them Successful

You get what you repeat. James Clear, Atomic Habits

Harvard Business School researchers conducted a detailed study tracking the 15-minute time increments of 27 successful CEOs over three months. While many of us are not CEOs, we have far more agency over our lives and wellbeing than we realize. You are the CEO of your life. The study uncovered some interesting wellness findings that any of us can implement in our own life:

Most exercise 45 minutes a day
Most spend 6 hours a day not working:
3 hours with family
3 hours downtime (tv, reading, hobbies)
Average 7 hours a night sleeping
They generally work face-to-face, as that was the best way for them to delegate, support their teams, and advance multiple agendas.
They avoid the email deluge and find email to be an ineffective and dangerous time sink as it cascades into personal time. They look for ways to limit it and create better digital norms, but this area needs more best practices.
They are Agenda-Driven, as they spend 43% of their time doing what is important but not urgent. They resist the pull to constantly put out fires, instead focusing on what moves them and their organizations forward.
They make meetings shorter and more effective. They found that many meetings were a matter of habit and could be shortened. (A leader I know removes all of his regular meetings from his calendar every quarter to make sure he is not dropping into a meeting trance.)

How do you think about how you spend your most important resource, time?

Porter, M. & Nohria, N. (2018). How CEOs Manage Time: Time is the scarcest resource leaders have. Where they allocate it matters—a lot. Harvard Business Review. July-August.

Wellbeing Ideas

Need a reset? Change in Perspective? Having a Bad day?

Check out this live bear cam at Katmai National Park in Alaska. They are chomping down salmon day and night. Give yourself 15 minutes and see how you feel.

Minimal Maxims

Clutter is less tempting when you are grounded in your values.
On a long enough timeline, nothing is permanent.
The fear of change exposes our insecurities.
Admittance is expensive whenever clutter is the cost of admission.
A coercive relationship extinguishes the potentiality of love.
Freedom is the byproduct of letting go.
The truth does not require consensus to remain true.
Life is too short to sell yourself short.
Silence is the best explanation.
Today’s impulse purchases are tomorrow’s regrets.

From the Minimalists. Find more quotes at MinimalMaxims.com

Memento Mori

Stoic wisdom. I’m a big fan of setting up mornings for success. Life is short so let’s not waste it.

What Meditation can do for Us

Cory Muscara meditated 15 hours a day for 6 months and wrote a list of 36 things he learned.

Here’s a few of the insights that stood out to me:

A sign of growth is having more tolerance for discomfort. But it’s also having less tolerance for bullshit.
Procrastination is the refusal or inability to be with difficult emotions.
What you hate most in others is usually what you hate most in yourself.
The issue is not that we get distracted. It’s that we’re so distracted by distractions we don’t even know we’re distracted.

TEAMING

In my work with organizations, team wellbeing is a major focus. An interesting talk on Teaming- because more of us are having to work with different people all the time and form team on the fly.

Movie Spoilers

I went to grad school for a decade (I DO NOT recommend it and recognize it as my favorite mistake). As a result, many movies and cultural references I have not seen. Enter the movie spoiler website- enter any move title and it will provide a summary plot and an ending. I looked up Jaws (1975) and did not remember that the shark was killed by putting a compressed air tank in its mouth.

Stay Well, Eileen