I was reading Brad Garlinghouse’s Peanut Butter Manifesto about Yahoo’s strategy having been spread too thin across too many opportunities. Quoting the memo,

I’ve heard our strategy described as spreading peanut butter across the myriad opportunities that continue to evolve in the online world. The result: a thin layer of investment spread across everything we do and thus we focus on nothing in particular. I hate peanut butter. We all should.

I also have a tendency to get myself into this problem. I try to be very generous with my time by spreading it among the many passions I have in my life. I try to maintain balance by looking for leverage in most of my activities. I’m trying to do things that compliment each other so that my peanut buttter is focused, and remains thick and crunchy (I actually like peanut butter). Once again from the memo,

My belief is that the smoothly spread peanut butter needs to turn into a deliberately sculpted strategy — that is narrowly focused.

Of course, this idea doesn’t just apply to companies. Everyone makes decisions on how to spend their time that involves choosing what is important and what is not. Every time I say yes to something, I am in fact also saying no to something else that may be more important. As such, I find having priorities or goals that I can build a strategy for how to focus my time is important.

I’m trying to allocate my time in the following manner. This isn’t scientific and doesn’t include hours spent with my family & friends outside of what I consider my professional work (which depending on how hard I’m working the amount of hours varies, but I try hard not to neglect it) . This is a fair approximation of how I’m scheduling my time.

  • Project Ojibwe is my main focus. Working at a startup requires a lot of effort and I am working a lot of hours on this project. With an angel financing closing this week, working with the team on the product development, hiring and getting the launch prepared - this is more than a full time job. I love it though and wouldn’t have it any other way. I actually have problems shutting down my brain or winding down, so I find working on other projects helps me balance.

  • Community & Volunteer Projects - Recently I’ve made it a concious effort to get more involved by volunteering on community projects. I consider myself incredibly fortunate to have had the experiences and succes I’ve had. I think it’s important to give back.
  • This includes my involvements in Barcamps and StartupCamp (participating in fostering the technology & entrepreneur community in Canada). Often times this is just showing up, other times it involves helping organize or arrange fundraising. If I can stay in the background as much as possible, simply helping others do great work here that is my preference.
  • I’m on the organizing committe for and speaking at the Montreal Youth Employement Services Entrepreneur conference this year (Mitch Joel who is great about volunteering his time who’s been involved there for years got me involved).
  • My friend Hugh McGuire asked me to join a great team on the advisory board for a project at the Atwater Digital Libary Center helping at risk teens learn critical technology skills (More on that project to come)
  • I’m on the advisory board for my friend Ron Dembo’s company Zero Footprint (as one of Canada’s technology success stories, Ron has focused on saving the environment with his new project - he is a great example of a social entrepreneur).
  • I’m also on the advisory board of Coburn Ventures and the Electronic Privacy Information Center. I haven’t been doing much for EPIC in the past couple of years - but I still support their mission and will be looking for some leverage points to help them in the future.

  • Personal Development - This is a broad category that includes personal goals related to my health and personal skill development. For instance, lately I’ve been filling my video iPod with samples of great public speakers (JFK, Ghandi, Steve Jobs, Clinton) to study and practice great presentation & public speaking techniques. Doing this while I work out is a great way to leverage the time for two goals (Health & Personal Development) Other times this includes learning a new tool (such as Illustrator which provided me with the fancy pie chart of my time above). This is the first time I’ve actively scheduled my personal development time into my professional calendar. I find it much easier to give myself this time when I have specific goals & skills that I’ve scheduled myself to learn.

  • Mentoring & Advising Startups - I enjoy working with startups. I learn a lot from mentoring and helping out teams occasionally getting involved where I feel that my contribution is unique and significant enough to make it worth both my time and the startups. This is the hardest one for me, as I have to say no to pretty much all startup offers that come my way since I have a limited number of slots available to work with teams. I always try to find the time to meet with a team at least once, to hear what they are about and how I can help them. Most often, I give them my advice on the challenges they face, some feedback on how to present the idea to investors, and if I feel it’s worthwhile I refer them to VCs or angel investors who would be a good fit for them. There are three companies that I’m more formally involved with, either sitting on a board (just one) or actively helping the management team in strategy or fundraising (the other two). One of these companies is a new startup that I’m helping get organized, that grew out of Barcamp Montreal and we’ll be launching in 2007. I’m not day to day on this, but am one of the co-founders providing some resources. The idea and my co-founders were unique enough that I decided it was worth including in my schedule.

So for 2007 my dance card is looking pretty full.

With such a busy schedule, I look for leverage in most of my activities. My blogging, my impending podcast are both activities that I can leverage for all my goals since they apply equally to all my various projects.

Blogging is an activity that helps me to achieve all of my main goals. I have personal development goals related to blogging (writing quality, skills, goals for my Technorati rating etc.). I also use my blog to help engage in conversations with Canadian entrepreneurs. The topics I am writing about in my blog are related to some of the work we will be doing with Project Ojibwe. I also am using my blog to support volunteer activities that I’m involved with.

So blogging is a leverage activity. Consider it the crunchy peanut in my peanut butter :)

The central strategy behind all my time investments is building community through serving others. This is the central strategy in how I spent all my professional time. Part of this service includes me saying no more often then yes. I would be performing a disservice to get involved with every startup who approached me since my peanut butter would be bland and weak.

BTW - Jim Estill is another Canadian CEO who is writing about time management. His blog is worth a look if this topic interests you.

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On Mon 11 Dec 2006.