Leading Everywhere, All at Once
How I'm Using the TL Model Right Now
tldr - I’m applying the TL model to how I’m managing (saving) my own time, how I’m managing (making) time across 3 “organizations”, and how I’m escaping time with the TL movement - which envisions a future democratic ownership society we can build together.
read time: 7 minutes
Hi Timeless Leaders,
It’s been a while since I explicitly called back to my introductory post1 on the Timeless Leader model, let alone described how I’m putting it into action.
As I find myself leveraging it for my work across all three dimensions of leadership, I thought it might be helpful to share what that application looks like.
As you read below, I invite you to reflect on your own methods of leading and how you align your choices towards the lasting legacy you wish to build. Are you doing the most important work? Are you leveraging time effectively and thinking on the right time scales?
Do your actions contribute to building a democratic ownership society - or whatever positive vision of the world you want to leave behind?
These are some of the questions I’m asking myself on a regular basis. Read on to see how I’m attempting to answer them.
Leading Myself - Save Time
I’m now in my 9th month of solopreneurship since leaving Slate. It’s two years since leaving the relative security of Box. In this time, I’ve gone through many iterations of uncertainty, shiny-object syndrome, and feast-and-famine cycles. Without a manager and with only limited budget I’m allocating to coaching, my own time management is ground zero for refining the “Saving Time” method for leading myself.
Focus Minute-to-Minute, Day-to-Day
A single person can only do so many things at once, but a business also needs a lot of different components to run. I’ve crafted a fairly extensive strategy for building Timeless Leader over multiple years, yet the biggest question I face almost daily is what should I do, NOW? Increasing revenue, building an audience, and building and testing solutions depend on one another while also competing with each other.
After much trial and error, I’ve boiled down the my essential tasks right now for developing Timeless Leader to:
MVP sales and marketing - LinkedIn posts, direct outbound messages, and staying consistent with the newsletter aspect of this Substack
Innovation - crafting a compelling productized version of the Timeless Leader community of practice (leveraging this Substack), with a emphasis on (1) live gatherings (two tiers) and (2) designing and testing the TL practices and resources particularly through client work
Client delivery - focus on excellence with my first retainer client
There’s a lot I’ve tried to eliminate from my work to-do list, as much as it pains me to let certain fires burn. For example, I’ve held off on several exciting marketing initiatives, including a podcast (which I’ve talked about here before), a website upgrade (I’ll share more about this in the coming weeks), and running social media ads. Even though I know all of these will boost engagement, CRO, and pipeline, I’m not ready to take on the work and execute it well - and the results will be better when there’s more proof and momentum behind the offerings.
Beyond the work portion of my commitments, I also need to find focus in other aspects of my life. How can I show up as a good dad and husband? How can I manage my commitments and responsibilities to my health and my community? I’ve prioritized being the lead parent when it comes to the physical demands of school drop-off and pickups, early morning rises, doctor appointments and sick days. Nimmi and I have agreed not to over-schedule the kids (and by extension, ourselves) with too many enrichment activities or travel plans. I’ve limited volunteer work to a few key committees at our daughter’s elementary school, even though I feel pulled to do more work there and on the pressing issues in our local, national, and global stage.
Systems, Sequencing, Cycles
I’ve leaned into several systems to help me navigate these competing demands, stay sane, and continue to grow. I’m fairly consistent with a daily meditation and journaling practice. I’ve leveraged a VA to help me manage my email and calendar, and I consult with Claude to process complex planning and execution tasks when I need to test different approaches. I’ve also been keeping a Time Journal in Excel, and at Nimmi’s insistence have just started trying out Toggl2 to help me with analytics with my time.
Ultimately much of leading myself comes down to the micro-moments of how I feel, how I act, how I speak. I control the habits of the day, the hour, the minute, even the second - and this is where I stand to make the most of compounding impact.
Leading Orgs - Make Time
I first introduced some of the concepts of Making Time with the story of the Time Wizards I worked with at Democracy Prep3. I’ve now spent more than a decade exploring how organized groups of people can synchronize their clocks and calendars to achieve alignment and foster effective collaboration.
Today there are three primary organizational contexts where I operate - my nuclear family unit, Timeless Leader (mostly me, but coordinating support from a VA, an intern), and Edstruments (where I’m embedded as a fractional Chief of Staff). For each of these groups, my ability to Make Time (e.g. craft or shape the rhythms of the org) is a superpower for driving engagement, performance, and satisfaction.
While there are contexts (sports teams, musical ensembles, emergency response teams) where coordinating collaboration to the moment are truly essential, when leading human organizations to produce change, the primary canvases for making time are usually the week, the month, and the quarter. It’s in the course of a week that multiple priorities across different individuals can be arranged. Over a month outcomes can be tracked. Over a quarter responsibilities can be reassigned and resource allocation can be adjusted.
I have weekly, monthly, and quarterly rhythms for every organization I’m part of. These rhythms include goal setting, outcome tracking, and resource allocation. In between each ritual review and discussion it’s relatively easy to focus on what needs to happen.
Do you have techniques or strategies for Making Time in the organizations you are a part of? How is that helping individuals come together to achieve goals and align their strengths, needs, and ambitions together?
Leading Movements - Escape Time
I’ve done a lot of work lately to flesh out what the Timeless Leadership movement is all about, and have arrived at the following:
We are building a democratic ownership society.
This vision weaves together the threads of improving ourselves and charting our own paths, building careers and businesses that are financially rewarding and beneficial to our communities, and building portfolio lives where we contributing the the big social changes we believe in and that matter long term.
This vision seeks to align the energies of so many well-intentioned movements and organizations and individuals, and coalesce around a powerful vision of freedom, peace, justice, truth, and love.
The specific pillars of the movement are:
End gun violence → empower peaceful citizenship
End abject poverty → enable free enterprise for all
End extremist ideologies → foster a culture of learning
I have profound clarity in identifying these pillars and how they can act as the core of a society that involve all of its people to solve all of its own problems. Building towards this future a long-lasting commitment, one I am committed to spending the rest of my life on, and one that I recognized will take at least Ten Million Timeless Leaders to bring about.
This vision is so big, it goes well beyond the time I have, however you measure it.
I may never see the day that we build this society - it may take decades - even generations. Yet I’m committed to building it and enabling others - many of you (I hope), and many that will follow - to carry on the work.
With the long-view crystal clear, there are immediate and urgent needs to organize.
My vision for this society is centered on the US, and while it’s not limited to our borders I believe that without the US participating in the project it will be much harder for any society to realize this vision.
We are facing a pivotal moment in our country’s history, and what we choose to do now can ultimately make a huge difference in what the next several decades looks like.
This Saturday
On April 19th, we’ll observe the 250th anniversary of the first shots of the Revolutionary War. My own ancestors fought the British on that very day at the Battle of Lexington, and made sure that ultimately a new form of government - Of the People, By the People, For the People - could take shape and be passed on to us.
In recognition of this incredible historical moment… and to meet our historical moment - Americans nationwide will go out in the streets to declare that we will still have “No Kings”.4
Whatever else you have going on in your life or your organizations - the movement for self-determination, for fairness, for the Rule of Law, and for a democratic ownership society - needs you now.
With peace, solidarity, and resolve,
-Joe
My introductory post to the TL model.
Try https://toggl.com/ for time tracking.
On the April 19th rallies. https://www.newsweek.com/nationwide-trump-protest-april19-50501-handsoff-2056119