The week that never comes

Imagine a time when all the urgent work is done. 

Clients are happy. There are no team dramas. The figures are together, you are ahead of the marketing, retainers are on track and every project is somehow slightly ahead of schedule. You have a full week to do work on whatever you want. How are you spending that time?

The best answer of course is something like “Take the week off and spend it with loved ones”, but let’s spoil that dream for a minute and say that you need to be “at work”. In fact you need to be working on something ‘on the business’ that makes a genuine positive difference.

Answers I get when I ask this are as varied as the agencies I speak to. But some of the real answers I have been given to this question by agency founders include:

• One on one time to level up key people in the company
• Update templates / design systems to improve delivery
• Update (or create!) SOPs
• POC that new product idea
• Automating repetitive tasks
• Learn a thing (let’s face it – usually AI)
• Sharpen messaging
• Do a long overdue migration

All worthy things. All things that could genuinely help move the business forwards. All things that really shouldn’t be at the bottom of the pile waiting for the planets to align and create time for them.

Narrator’s voice: “The planets never aligned”

The truth you probably already know (but is still worth saying) is that this mythical clear week of peace and calm will never materialise. And that of course means that you will probably never do these important things if you wait for that time to come.

The time does usually show up for most of us though, even if it doesn’t feel that way. A work-free week might not be realistic, but a slightly quieter Wednesday morning is, as is a flat spot on a Friday afternoon or a weird gap on a Thursday. These times do turn up, they are just fragmented and don’t arrive clearly labelled as “founder time”.

The default is often to fill these gaps with low value work. We clear out inboxes, we catch up on some admin, we dip into some promised reading and do various other things that keep us feeling like we’re being productive when the business is busy. 

There’s a thornier problem underneath that too. A lot of what rushes in to fill those quieter pockets isn’t generic busy work. It’s the things that have been waiting on you specifically. The decision someone parked for when you had a minute. The supplier query that needs your sign-off. The bit of feedback the team can’t move forward without. Your quiet time isn’t just being eaten by admin, it’s being eaten by everything that only you can do. That’s what makes founder time uniquely hard to protect. 

Unless we deliberately claim that time for what is important it gets invisibly absorbed into the daily triage of “everything”. 

Founders who consistently get these most-important things done are very rarely claiming full weeks for them. They either block time or actively claim it as it appears.

Blocking is the cleaner approach. Even a few afternoons a month, properly honoured, can shift the direction of a business. But plenty has already been written on time-blocking (including by me) and it doesn’t suit everyone. Instead let’s talk about an alternative for founders who can’t, or won’t, block regular time: Time-snatching.

If you can’t block time, snatch it

Time-snatching is a term I coined as a short-hand for being pro-active about claiming time for that important founder work as it becomes possible. This isn’t the same as “getting around to it when I can”. The difference is subtle, but important and it starts with picking a single priority. One.

You almost certainly have multiple pressing and conflicting founder-work priorities, but you don’t want to be working from a list. The goal here is to identify the one thing you should find time for next to improve. Pick one. Name it. Write it somewhere you will see it every day.

Deciding that priority item in advance means being ready to seize the opportunity when it arises. When the client call you had time blocked for gets cancelled you are not left wondering how to fill the time best (and invariably settling for the predictable fallbacks), but instead are ready to put that time to work to chip away at your priority commitment. 

One final thought. Whatever you’ve picked, treat it like you’d treat a client project. Name it. Give it a deadline. Check in on it. If you wouldn’t let a piece of paid work drift unattended for three months, don’t let this drift either.  

The question isn’t whether the time will show up. It will. The question is whether you’ve decided what’s important enough to deserve it and whether you have the discipline to use it well.