Five Ways to Spend Your CEO Time

Prioritizing CEO time is the key to being more intentional about the time you spend working on your business instead of staying stuck in the day to day work of developing recipes and writing blog posts. In today’s episode I’m sharing 5 ways you should spend your CEO time.

CEO time is a truly essential part of moving your business forward. Because food blogging is so demanding, and there is always something else to do, prioritizing this time is essential.

I’ve discussed CEO time many times on the podcast before (like this episoode with 3 Things to Do For CEO Time and How to Schedule More CEO Time) but today I wanted to share a few more tips on how you should spend this time.

1) Pause and check in

As with many parts of our business, when you get time to work on something it’s tempting to jump in head first and get stuff done.

With CEO time, however, pausing before you jump in can be really helpful.

Before you dig into your work, reflect on a few things!

1. How am I feeling about my business lately?
2. What can I celebrate in my business right now?
3. Where do I feel stuck, behind, or overwhelmed?
4. How is my ideal week going?
5. Where do I need support right now?

These emotional and capacity check ins will help set the tone for the remainder of your CEO time. It’s important to start here because a lot of us don’t take time regularly to check in like this and it can unlock so much about what we want or need to do for our business.

2) Financial To Do’s

1. Pay any outstanding invoices
2. Planning for ways to increase income such as planning for brand partnerships, thinking about ways to increase your ad revenue, researching or implementing new income streams, etc.
3. Reviewing your budget and/or income coming up
4. Making decisions about big purchases

3) Metrics

This might not be something you need to check in every time you do CEO time, depending on how often you do it, BUT it can be great to do this monthly or quarterly at least.

Metrics are great to have but if you don’t do anything with them they are just numbers.

When you review your metrics, do this:

1. Look at your traffic year over year and look to see if it has increased or decreased
2. Look to see which posts specifically contributed to that increase and take note of major changes (possibly from a rank dropping).

The key here it to find out why there was this change in traffic and what contributed to it.

You can use this same approach to social media following, income changes, or any other metric you choose to track. Don’t just write down the metric itself, but dig into the reason behind it.

Then be sure to make a plan going forward if something needs to change to reverse that change.

4) Goal Setting, Planning or Executing

If you are doing CEO time weekly, checking in on your goals for the month and making sure you are making progress is a really great thing to be sure you are not getting behind.

If you are doing CEO time monthly, use that time to set goals as well as planning out the steps needed to reach them.

Related: Setting SMART Goals for Your Blog

CEO time is also a great time to spend some implementation time executing things to help you reach our goals. The caution here is to not get sucked into the day to day tasks of your blog like editing photos or writing blog posts. That type of implementation work is usually easier for us to prioritize because it feels urgent and important. But we want to stay at a higher level during CEO time!

5) Education

Working through a course you’ve purchased or listening to a podcast AND implementing what it talks about is a great way to spend your CEO time. I often will go back and re-slisten to an episode during CEO time to take the action steps that the episode talks about.

Even just having a block of time during your CEO time for education will encourage you to look for ways to use that time! It could be a webinar replay, podcast episode, blogging course, or spending some time researching the latest thing happening in the industry.