What to Do When You Feel Overwhelmed with Fran Hauser

Intro: Welcome to The Daily Bolster. Each day, we welcome transformational executives to share their real world experiences and practical advice about scaling yourself, your team, and your business.

Matt Blumberg: Welcome to The Daily Bolster. I'm Matt Blumberg, co- founder and CEO of Bolster. And I'm here today with my good friend for the last 25 years or more, Fran Hauser, that makes both of us sound much older than we actually are. Fran is a former C- suite executive. She is a bestselling author. She is a speaker. She is a startup investor. She is a mom. And she is passionate about leveling the playing field for women. So Fran, thank you for being here today.

Fran Hauser: Oh, my gosh. Matt, I'm so happy to be here with you. Thank you for having me.

Matt Blumberg: Absolutely. So I have a really important question for you. So as you know, people who watch this or listen to this are CEOs. CEOs are always frenzied this week more than most. And my question for you is, what are your top three suggestions for CEOs who feel like they just don't have enough time to get it all done?

Fran Hauser: Okay. It's a great question. So the first thing that I would say is to start by being really intentional about where you want to spend your time. What are the things that are really going to move the needle for you and your business? And write those things down. It could be three things. It could be four things. Have them on your phone, have them up on your bulletin board, wherever you're going to see them all the time. And I would suggest doing a weekly check- in, either on a Friday or maybe over the weekend, where you look at your to- do list and you look at your calendar for the upcoming week and look for alignment against those priorities.

Matt Blumberg: I love that. And the important thing is that it's 3 or 4, not 27.

Fran Hauser: Exactly. It's three or four things. And you just want to make sure that that's really where you're spending your time. I've been doing this for 10 years. And still, I will make changes to my calendar the weekend before. I'll shorten inaudible.

Matt Blumberg: I'm with you. I do the same thing.

Fran Hauser: I think that's number one.

Matt Blumberg: That's number one. Okay. What's number two?

Fran Hauser: Number two is to create office hours. So what I've found is that I have a lot of people who reach out to me, who want to pick my brain. And so every Tuesday, I have three 20- minute sessions available from 10:00 to 11: 30. I have a Calendly link. And I send the link. And what I really like about this is that it's my give back time, right? I know that's my give back time. But I'm setting boundaries, right? I'm saying... And I feel good about it. When I'm actually doing those meetings, I actually feel good about it. I don't feel good when I look at my calendar and my whole calendar is consumed with give back time.

Matt Blumberg: I love that. I love that about just focusing it. It's what my friend Brad Feld used to do. He used to call it his random day.

Fran Hauser: Great. I love it. I love it.

Matt Blumberg: Okay. And what's number three?

Fran Hauser: Number three is to create a to- don't list. So we all have our to- do lists, right? And they're usually very, very long. I love the idea of having a to- don't list.

Matt Blumberg: I love this. This is great. I've never heard this before.

Fran Hauser: So good. So if I look at my to- don't list for this year, there's some pretty big things on there. I'm not writing a third book, even though my publisher keeps asking me to. That's not something that I'm going to do this year. I'm not joining any board of directors. I have my list of things that I'm not going to do, and it just creates this mind space, right? Because I just know what my answer is going to be if I get asked to participate in any of these things that are on my to- don't list. So I highly, highly recommend that one.

Matt Blumberg: I love all three of these suggestions. Thank you so much for being here. Will you come back and do one of our longer form interviews, too?

Fran Hauser: I would love to.

Matt Blumberg: All right. Thanks, Fran.

Fran Hauser: Thanks, Matt.