It is so easy to get caught up in the day-to-day of what you have to do to run your food blog. But spending time working ON your business rather than in it can be the key to long term success and growth. If you want to spend more time growing your business, keep listening to this episode about how you can schedule more CEO time – or the time you spend growing your food blog! 

Super excited to dive into this topic around CEO time. This is one of my absolute favorite topics to share and also to remind myself of because this is something that I often struggle with, especially in seasons of busyness.

So it is always something I love to come back to at the beginning of the year to try to kind of set a foundation around this idea of scheduling in more CEO time.

First things first, what do I mean by CEO time?

Essentially, CEO time is the time that you’re spending working on your business: working on the growth tasks for your business and working behind the scenes.

It is not the time that you are spending creating content or specifically creating recipe blog posts. It’s more of the high level tasks that you need to do as the CEO of your business to help it grow and to help the momentum of your business.

Related: Check out more blog posts on how to go from Blogger to CEO.

CEO work is the tasks and the strategizing that you need to do to keep your business moving forward and growing and ultimately making a bigger impact with your blog.

Food bloggers are looking to make a bigger impact and to do that we have to step out of the day-to-day of the menial tasks that we have to do for our food blog and think ahead. Think about things like new products we want to create, new revenue streams to explore, new partnerships we could build.

So often it is hard to fit that CEO time into our schedule, even though it is so important. It often feels like the thing that can get put on the back burner because the other stuff that we have to do for our blog feels more urgent.

Let’s talk about how you can schedule more of the CEO time, whether you already have a little bit of it or you have absolutely none of it, and you want to be able to spend more time on these important parts of your business.

Schedule it into your ideal week

Your ideal week is essentially like a template of the ideal way that you would like to spend your time during your week. It is going to have the time blocks for you where you maybe have your work time, your family time, and hopefully your CEO time as well.

Make sure that it’s a part of your schedule and it’s something that you do on a regular basis, whether that is every week, every two weeks, once a month, whatever it is that fits into your schedule, make sure it’s a part of that ideal week.

Have a plan for your time

The fastest way to never do CEO time again is to have a time where you plan to work on your business and you end up wasting that time. You’re going to start feeling like it’s not worth your time to spend time working on your business in that way.

So make sure that you have a plan before you start. I like to make sure the night before that I am really thinking through what I’m going to accomplish during this time, and making sure that I have a realistic amount of things to do during that time so that I can feel really accomplished at the end.

This is going to build momentum and help you to feel good about the CEO time that you’re spending, and ultimately want to keep doing it.

Have a few recurring things you do each time such as:

• Setting and reviewing your goals for the month, quarter or year.
• Reviewing metrics
• Setting up tasks for yourself and your team 
• Spending time learning
• Mapping out or working on bigger projects

Stack it with another habit

Take a habit that you already have and add something else to that habit that is already formed. A good example is during your time every evening where you’re watching tv, maybe you do some stretches or some yoga to unwind from the day.

Find a habit you already have and try to add CEO time into it, like the time you spend waiting in the drop off line, the doctor’s office lobby, or an hour that you take your kids to the park.

Reward yourself

Rewarding yourself during or after your CEO time can help boost productivity and your desire to continue adding CEO time to your regular routines. Get a special treat or coffee or perhaps visit your favorite coffee shop or take yourself out to lunch to work on your business.

Find smaller pockets of time

If you are just getting started with CEO time, instead of feeling like you need an entire CEO day, find smaller pockets of time like an hour each week that you can dedicate to working on your business.

Once you get into this habit, you’ll be craving more and more of that CEO time!

Related episode: 3 Things to do on Every CEO Day