Lenny Rachitsky: recommendation

Transcript context

…For me, and again, this is where the framework is intentionally flexible, different people have different highlights. But for me, I am very project oriented. I'm very work oriented. And for me, most days, a really good day comes from having made progress on something that is really important to me. So, my highlights are usually focused work, creative work related. And this has become even more important since we started our own VC firm three years ago. And before that, I was sort of, I guess, more or less a writer, full-time writing, and speaking at events, and doing some consulting. And before that, I was a partner at Google Ventures, at GV, and before that I was a product designer. So, I've been through different modes and contexts in my career. But if you know any VCs, if you're listening to this and you know any VCs, they're probably the busiest, most frazzled people that you know who are constantly on email, constantly in Zoom calls and meetings, and on airplanes all the time. And so, the natural environment of that work is the busy bandwagon, and it's to have a lot of infinity pools that you need to care about. And so, in that context, in order for us to make progress on projects, in order for us to move the ball on a launch related to this program, Character Labs, that we run with pre-seed founders that's coming up, or we're writing a new book, and that's a big project, or working with one of our portfolio companies and running a sprint with them, or writing a newsletter that goes out to our LPs, those things are all really important, and I feel like they give us a unique edge as a VC firm. If we accept the premise I said before, that most VCs are just sort of frantically running around, if we can take these bigger swings at things, then theoretically, they should really help us be successful. So, most of the time, it's all a very long way of saying that most of the time my highlights are like, "What do I want to accomplish at work? What is the thing that I want to get done today?" And so, what I do then is, I structure my calendar around making time for that. There's a tactic in the book called Design Your Day that is really about kind of drawing out your day, and using your calendar as a canvas where you can design how you want to spend your time rather than using your calendar as a thing that is done to you, a thing that tells you what you have to do. Reclaim control over that. And so, most days, the first half of the day before lunch is my focus time, and I protect that very, very intensely, and then use that time to work on whatever my highlight is. We had a previous guest on, Neer Eyal, also talking about productivity, and he had actually the same advice of just using your calendar as your to-do list, basically, because that's where time's going to go, what your calendar's telling you to do. So, I think there's a pattern here that I think people need to pay attention to. Yeah, definitely. Yeah, and I mean, we take it even further, and we have sort of a calendar template that we use as a team. So, we have certain times of the week. And it's not exactly the same for all of us on the team, but there are certain times of the week where it's like, yeah, this is when we do these kinds of things. This is when we have these kinds of meetings. And not to say that those are all standing meetings, although we have some of those as well, but these are kind of the content buckets in the template that we can fill with a specific type of activity, but then other parts of the template are sort of reserved for focus work, reserved for individual, solo time to work on things that we need to get done. So, yeah. I think the calendar is, at an individual level and especially at a team level, is this really powerful tool that most people just kind of... Not only do they not use it as a tool, they just sort of hate it. They're sort of like, "Ugh, my calendar, it's a mess. If I could live without a calendar, that would be the dream." But I think if you can use some of these tactics or use other approaches to reclaim it, and use it proactively as a tool for yourself, it can really help you structure your time around the things that you care about.…

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