Calendar Audit
The most useful thing I do each week
Time and attention is our most valuable resource.
The first thing I do every Monday morning is write an email to my team with a summary of what I did in the previous week. I use a set template and it takes no more than 15 mins to write.
The email includes the following categories (it would naturally differ for other roles and industries):
- People I met
- Events I attended
- Marketing activity (anything related to external content, press, messaging)
- Fundraising (yes, VCs have investors too)
- Upcoming (anything specific my team should be aware of in the week ahead)
- Company management (meetings and projects related to the ongoing management of Connect as a firm)
- Portfolio management (board meeting updates / company fundraising updates / anything else that’s important)
- Dealflow management (new companies I met / companies I’m spending more time on)
I only include a very short summary on each item. If anything warrants more detail then I make sure to discuss it in our team meeting later the same day.
The benefits for me…
- A weekly routine for reviewing (in a structured way) how I’m spending my time — this is the most valuable part of the process. For example, it quickly becomes obvious if I’m spending too much time on internal company admin versus meeting new investment opportunities.
- It reminds me of the key issues I need to update my team on (i.e. the things that need to be discussed in more detail in our team meeting or 1-on-1). Without this preparation my contribution to our team meeting risks being sporadic.
- It clarifies my actions for the week ahead —including the people and companies I need to follow up with.
The benefits for my team…
- It gives them insight into what I’m working on
- It’s easy to skim read before our team meeting (and takes less time than a verbal update)
- It’s helpful context for the discussions that will take place in the team meeting itself
- It often reveals a useful piece of information that would otherwise have been too trivial to discuss in-person — this is my favourite benefit
- It helps openness and collaboration (despite my team already having shared access to my diary)
- It signals that I care about how I use my time — I’m accountable to my team
I started doing this ‘diary audit’ for my own benefit, to make sure I was focused on the right ratio of activity over time. I really noticed the benefits so I began to share it with my team. My team also noticed the benefits and began to reciprocate. Now everyone uses the same structure. This is great — I often find the stickiest team habits are the ones that happen organically.
I now get a really helpful weekly summary completed in less than 30mins on a Monday morning (15mins to write my own and 3mins to read the update from each of my team).
Every team and person is different but I can highly recommend some version of this process to help you personally track your time and also promote sharing across your team.
