An Exact Breakdown of How One CEO Spent His First Two Years of Company-Building

Plenty of folks out there are curious about how a startup founder/CEO spends their time — whether you've got long-term goals for becoming a CEO someday, or you work at a startup now and aren't quite sure what exactly the CEO does (although they sure seem busy!). But information on this front is either overly broad (think "I spend half my day solving problems") or incomplete (like skipping over the many hours spent responding to emails).

When Levels co-founder and CEO Sam Corcos set out to start tracking his time in the first two years of building the startup, he got, in his words, "a bit obsessive" — meticulously recording every 15-minute increment.

In our latest on the Review, he shares his findings with us for an unvarnished, data-driven look at what it's really like to sit in the CEO seat. He deep-dives into each category for how he spends his time, from recruiting and networking to managing investors, plus functional work like sales, marketing and engineering.

There are some surprises along the way — like the realization that he was only spending 3% of his time recruiting, even though it felt like a whole lot more. His takeaway? "Work that is fun, easy, or energizing feels like it takes up less time, while work that is demanding or emotionally taxing feels like it takes up more of my time than it actually does," he says.

Throughout the article, Corcos shares a ton of hard-earned lessons for other current and future CEOs. He unpacks his tips for upping your effectiveness by building a fire department — not acting as a firefighter. He also makes the case for killing your to-do list and leaning on your calendar instead: "The problem with to-do lists is they lead to unrealistic optimism about how much you can accomplish because items on a to-do list are untethered from the constraint of reality: time," he says.

This read is jam-packed with tips and tactics for you to try right away — from email hacks to trimming down meetings to organizing a "Think Week" for wrestling with your startup's thorniest problems. And, of course, there are ideas for implementing your own calendar tracking strategy so you can level up as a startup leader.

As always, thanks for reading and sharing!

-The Review editors

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