How a busy CTO got back control over his time and calendar with Headroom Executive Assistants

The Challenge:

This full-stack data science agency is growing fast across Europe. And as the company grows, its executives are taking over new and more complex functions and responsibilities.

Joe joined the company as Director and was involved in many different projects and departments. This meant lots of long email chains and  overlapping meetings.

Naturally, he felt like he never had enough time to do it all. So he often found himself working 10 hours a day, including evenings and weekends.

The Goal: less working hours and more work-life balance

Joe was taking over the role of CTO and expected to become less and less involved in the operational side of business. There was a chance for him to work less hours by better managing his inbox and calendar. The ultimate goal was to achieve a healthier work-life balance.

And that’s why he joined Headroom.

How we gave Joe back control over his agenda and time

We introduced Joe to his primary Headroom EA and got a pulse of the time-management challenges he was facing.

Firstly, we identified his main pain point: not having enough time for deep focus work and an overflowing inbox that made it hard to keep track of what needed to be done for each project.

How did we fix the inbox dilemma?

We came up with a structured way of working that gave Joe enough time for his clients, team and personal tasks: we started by mapping out the different work-streams and departments Joe was involved in. Then we categorized all communications based on the type of projects, and tasks based on whether they were urgent, ongoing etc.

For each project or work-stream, we created a dedicated sub-folder in Joe’s inbox – we took inspiration from a law firm we worked with, where we created folders for each of their cases.

Joe’s EA keeps track of priorities for each week and make sure he has enough time to focus on them, by creating time blocks in his calendar and scheduling meetings around them.

They also keep each folder up-to-date. In this way, inbox doesn’t overflow with old emails.

On top of this, we also regularly help Joe with:

• Handling LinkedIn invites
• Taking notes during meetings
• Arranging business travels

The results: less is more

All emails are now sorted into specific sub-folders. In this way, Joe keeps a clear overview of ongoing communications for each project and nothing falls through the cracks. At the beginning of every week his primary EA discusses priority accounts for the following days.

• Joe isn’t working on weekends and evenings anymore, he’s become more of a 9-6 kind of executive, and he loves it
• He doesn’t have to deal with more than 20 emails at a time
• He’s way more focused, less stressed and stays on top of things
• He’s recently had a big jump in his career

By delegating all of this to Headroom EAs, Joe earned back 25-30 hours a month to focus on what matters most to him. That’s basically 1 day a week freed up!

We’re still working side-by-side with Joe and other C-suite at his company to improve processes and keep giving him time back. That’s because we like to be proactive and believe there are always more possibilities we can unlock together.