How Great Leaders Invest Their Time

In this short, actionable episode, Ray Sclafani challenges leaders with a powerful question: If the last 90 days of your calendar were published on the front page of the Wall Street Journal, would you be proud of how you invested your time?

Ray shares a simple but revealing leadership exercise, a calendar audit, inspired by research from Harvard Business School on how CEOs manage their time. By reviewing the last 90 days of your calendar and categorizing activities as green, yellow, or red, leaders can quickly see where they are creating value, where they should delegate, and what should be eliminated entirely.

Because in leadership, success isn’t determined by how busy you are, it’s determined by where you invest your time.

Key Takeaways

1. Leaders often say what matters most to them, but their calendar shows what they actually prioritize. Review the last 90 days of your calendar and evaluate whether your time reflects your highest leadership priorities.
2. A simple leadership exercise is to analyze your schedule regularly to understand where your time is going. Pull up your calendar for the past 90 days and categorize every activity using the Red, Yellow, Green framework.
3. Identify one responsibility you can transition to another team member to help develop leadership within the organization.
4. What leaders spend time on communicates what matters most within the organization.
5. Everyone operates within the same 168 hours each week, making intentional allocation critical. Before accepting new commitments, ask: Does this align with my highest priorities as a leader?

Questions Financial Advisors Often Ask

Q: What is the most important leadership time management exercise mentioned in the episode?
A: The episode recommends conducting a calendar audit of the last 90 days. Leaders review their calendar and categorize activities into green, yellow, or red to evaluate how effectively they are investing their time.

Q: What does the red, yellow, green calendar exercise mean?
A: The exercise categorizes leadership activities based on their value. Green activities represent the best use of a leader’s time, such as meetings with top clients, developing future leaders, strategic thinking, recruiting talent, and planning firm growth. Yellow activities are useful but could eventually be transitioned to others in the organization. Red activities are tasks that should be delegated, eliminated, or automated.

Q: Why is a leader’s calendar important for business success?
A: A leader’s calendar reveals what they actually prioritize. The episode explains that what gets time gets attention, and what gets attention gets results, meaning the way leaders allocate their time directly impacts organizational outcomes.

Q: Why should leaders think of time as an investment?
A: The episode explains that leaders often say they “spend” time, but investing time implies a return. Effective leaders treat time like capital and focus on ensuring every hour contributes value to the firm’s future.

Q: How can delegating tasks improve leadership capacity?
A: Delegating tasks allows leaders to focus on strategic priorities while giving others the opportunity to step into new responsibilities. Leadership capacity grows when leaders intentionally step down from tasks so others can step up.

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What is Building The Billion Dollar Business?

Hosted by Financial Advisor Coach, Ray Sclafani, "Building The Billion Dollar Business" is the ultimate podcast for financial advisors seeking to elevate their practice. Each episode features deep dives into actionable advice and exclusive interviews with top professionals in the financial services industry. Tune in to unlock your potential and build a successful, enduring financial advisory practice.

Ray Sclafani (00:00.142)
you

Welcome to building the billion dollar business, the podcast where we dive deep into the strategies, insights, and stories behind the world's most successful financial advisors and introduce content and actionable ideas to fuel your growth. Together, we'll unlock the methods, tactics, and mindset shifts that set the top 1 % apart from the rest. I'm Ray Sclafani and I'll be your host. Well, let me begin with a dangerous question. Imagine this.

We take the last 90 days of your calendar and publish them on the front page of the Wall Street Journal tomorrow morning. I mean your entire schedule, every meeting, every appointment, every block of time. Now ask yourself one question. Would you be proud of how you've invested your time? Have you allocated each moment with precision? Calendars are brutally honest. They reveal what we actually do, not what we say we do.

Today's episode is especially short by design. I want to maximize your time and get straight to the point. After all, time is our most limited commodity and I want to be respectful of yours. So here is the actionable idea for today. So goes your calendar, so goes your success. Your impact is a direct result of where you invest your time. Notice the word invest. We often say how we spend time.

Well, spending implies it just disappears. Investing implies a return. The most effective leaders treat their time like capital. Every hour should produce something valuable for the firm's future. And there are only 168 hours in a week. That's the entire supply. Nobody gets more. There was an article published in the Harvard Business Review by two Harvard Business School professors, Michael Porter and Nitin Ahoria.

Ray Sclafani (01:58.254)
The title of the article is How CEOs Manage Time. These two professors conducted a multi-year study tracking more than 60,000 hours of time across a various number of CEOs. They documented how leaders actually allocate their schedules and how time allocation shapes organizational priorities. What they found is that a leader's calendar is one of the clearest indicators of how well an organization actually operates.

Leaders signal priorities through their schedule. So what gets time gets attention and what gets attention ordinarily gets results, which is why at the end of every quarter, I run a very simple exercise. I conduct a calendar audit. I pull up the last 90 days of my calendar and I mark every activity using one of three colors, red, yellow, green. I'll start with the green activities because it's the most obvious. Green activities are the best use of your time.

These are the activities where your judgment, your relationships and your leadership create real value. And moving forward, you wanna keep the green. Those meetings with your most profitable clients, developing future leader meetings and thinking strategically about growth, creating that white space, recruiting top talent and building the future of the firm. Okay, green stays. Yellow activities while useful over time might be transitioned to others in the organization. Yellow means you start asking, well,

Who could I train to take this over? Leadership capacity expands when you intentionally step down from responsibilities so others can actually step up. And then there are the red activities. This is where brutal honesty matters most. Red is where you look at your calendar and think, what the heck am I doing? Meetings that accomplish very little, work that somebody else could do better than you, tasks that you could automate in some way using technology, AI.

commitments that simply linger from the past. Red means one of three things. You could delegate it, eliminate it, or automate it. Because every red block on your calendar is taking time away from something that actually matters. So as we close out this quarter, run the exercise, pull the calendar, red, yellow, green, keep the green, develop someone to take over the yellow, and remove the red as fast as possible. Because your success is not determined by how busy you are,

Ray Sclafani (04:18.87)
It's determined by where you invest your time with intention. So let me leave you with one coaching question to reflect on as you run this exercise. If your calendar for the next 90 days truly reflected your highest priorities as a leader, what shifts or changes would you make about how you invest your time moving forward? Well, thanks for tuning in and that's a wrap. Until next time, this is Ray Sclafani. Keep building, growing and striving for greatness together.

We'll redefine what's possible in the world of wealth management. Be sure to check back for our latest episode and article.