In freshman year of college, I tried to juggle multiple responsibilities and failed painfully and miserably. My grades suffered, my work quality in and outside of school deteriorated rapidly, and my mental health was at all time lows. Inspired by this difficult time, I have spent the past few years iteratively codifying a system for time management that has helped me successfully manage many moving pieces (even much more than what I attempted to take on freshman year).
In senior year of college, I simultaneously worked and rose to leadership roles at 5 different VC internships while writing a thesis, studying for an honors exam, working 3 tutoring jobs, and taking 5 economics and computer science classes.
Since graduation, I have worked simultaneously as a full time investor at Soma Capital, part time head of content at Elpha, and volunteer head of content at Harvard in Tech, Techstars Boston, and the Emerging VC Association while tutoring, running for 2 hours each day, writing my own content series, mentoring weekly with multiple groups, and surprisingly, as a rule I hold myself to, sleeping at least 7 hours each night.
I personally enjoy and prefer wearing many different hats and gaining exposure and adding value to multiple different groups. I find I work best when I am able to focus at the micro level but multitask at the macro level. It is, however, admittedly a tricky and challenging balance and one I am constantly trying to better strike.
I have shared here my learning through 6 tactical tips for time management.
Set an atomic level task for yourself each hour of the day. Too often, we set overly macro goals. Even something as seemingly specific as “fill content calendar for the next month” is actually too broad.
To fill the content calendar, for example, you need to reach out to people to write or to be interviewed.
But even that is too broad — how many people will you reach out to? Where will you find them? How will you find their contact information? Are warm intros necessary? If so, how will you arrange those? What email template are you using? Will you need to follow up with them? If so, when? What interview questions will you use when they respond positively?
All of these questions correspond to an actionable task: write the email template for outreach, find warm intros for 10 people, find the email addresses of 10 people, cold email 10 people, check in with everyone you emailed last Monday, or write the interview questions bank.
Schedule these atomic level tasks for each hour of the day from the moment you wake up to the moment you go to sleep. In this way, you break each of your goals into specific actions and schedule these actions for specific times of the day. Hold yourself to these actions as you would an actual meeting, and you will be incredibly efficient and timely in achieving all of your goals.
Set aside time for deep work and operationalize the rest. On weekdays which are usually packed with back to back calls and hundreds of emails, you can get quite reactionary. Even if you want to read, think, or write, it is incredibly difficult to do so in a distraction free environment.
Operationalize everything on weekdays, especially during the busiest blocks for the day (likely late mornings and afternoons). If you have any non-meeting down time, only schedule yourself for easily executable, almost mindless tasks, like sending pre-written email messages or finding email addresses for an existing list of people. In this way, you can still make progress even during crazier parts of the day.
On weekends, evenings and nights, and early mornings when you likely have fewer meetings/inbound notifications, block out time to do your deep work. Schedule a couple hours to write up an interview you did or read 100 pages of a book or write the outline of a thought piece.
Theme your hours, days, or weeks. When possible, decide on a theme for the day (or few hours or week), such as investor catch ups, investor first calls, portfolio company catch ups, new deal flow biotech IT, deep due diligence calls with developer tools companies, or candidate calls.
By packing similar meetings with each other, you will need less effort to excel at each meeting and can draw more insights from each meeting through benchmarking them to the others and sharing learnings across them.
Focus heavily on learning in a fully distraction free setting. Every morning for the first few hours of the day (I wake up quite early), I keep my phone on airplane mode and refrain from turning on my laptop, if possible. I love running, so I go for a run or do some other form of exercise for a couple hours and listen to podcasts or an audiobook for the entire time (I am more of an audio than visual learner).
The insights I learn from hearing accomplished investors, founders, and operators share their experiences and learnings are invaluable in how I contribute to meetings later in the day, how I write, and how I analyze opportunities.
For these few precious hours of the day when I have no way to send or receive messages of any kind, I am able to focus solely on learning and exercising, which helps me work smarter, not just harder, for the rest of the day.
Find ways to make the whole greater than the sum of its parts. While I do juggle multiple separate roles, I spend 30 minutes each week reflecting on how I can take lessons learned from each role and apply it in some form to the others.
For example, I often find ways I can take learnings from interviewing people for Elpha and apply them to asking thoughtful questions of founders in diligence calls through my work at Soma Capital.
Refine your micro-habits. Without getting overly reactionary, handle issues when they first arise and when they are still relatively minor and manageable.
Set aside time to at least read all relevant emails each day. After a meeting where someone asks you to make an easy email intro to someone else, make that intro if you have a couple minutes before your next call or task. If you let these small things pile up, you are left with a mound of tasks you cannot even begin to remember or find the motivation to handle.
Micro-habits are just like any other habits. They take time, patience, and consistent practice to form but become increasingly easier to exercise overtime.
