This guide outlines how to manage the CEO’s calendar to ensure clarity, efficiency, and alignment with priorities. The goal is to maintain a predictable schedule, reduce unnecessary context switching, and support asynchronous work.

Time is a finite resource, treat it as such.

Core principles

  • Accuracy: The calendar must always reflect the CEO’s true availability.
  • Clarity: Every meeting requires a purpose, agenda, and supporting context.
  • Protection of time: Buffers, OOO blocks, and focus periods must be respected.
  • Prioritization: The calendar is optimized around the CEO’s highest-impact work.
  • Timezone-aware: All scheduling must account for working hours and current timezone.

Daily Workflow

Every day, audit the calendar and agenda for the next 7 days. For each event please:

  • Ensure there's no overlapping meetings
    • Or when there's overlap in events, it's clear which one the CEO participates in and which meeting won't be attended.
  • Block times, by creating events, to travel to meetings on-site
  • Check the event anatomyfor meetings
  • Confirm hiring blocks, recurring syncs, and investor meetings are correctly placed.
  • Ensure all Out-of-Office (OOO) blocks remain intact.
  • Flag days that appear overloaded and raise concerns with the CEO.
  • Remove unused holds and outdated calendar blocks.
  • Check if excercise time are scheduled
  • Honor family time
  • Identify any sessions requiring CEO approval or rescheduling.
  • Check the week ahead for high-effort, investor-related, or time-sensitive commitments.

Exercise blocks

To remain fit and sane, the CEO tries to excercise about 6 times a week. Generally Wednesday has no excercise. Time requirements are different for the type of excercise is scheduled. While altering the excercise type is advised for physical recovery it's more important to excercise and have an opportunity to clear the mind and rethink problems during excercise.

Ensure that these blocks are scheduled, but note; are flexible blocks. Move them around during the day to make the most of the day, or change the type of excercise if we need more or less time in that day.

Excercise is a blocked calendar event, like all other events, to ensure it happens.

Personal time

The executive assistant is generally not involved in making personal appointments. Please respect personal commitments made, eventhough these could be during meeting hours.

Occasional exceptions may be made for important calls.

Calendar Event Anatomy

When creating or updating events, always include the agenda in the calendar invite to maintain clarity and preserve context. Add any relevant background information, and ensure the agenda is shared with all (external) participants.

Further, please check:

  1. Title and formatting of it
  2. Participants
    • Where all participants invited?
    • Can participants make the meeting?
    • Mark optional guests as such.
  3. Timezone
    • Put the timezone in the area the meeting is in, or the CEO lives in at the time of the meeting.
  4. Meeting location: either a virtual room (Google Meet / Huddle) or physical location
    • Verify one of these is set, and for each participant it's clear where to be when.
  5. Agenda and (internal) tasks
    • Verify each meeting includes all context, a purpose, agenda, and relevant links.
    • No agenda, no attenda
      • If there's nothing to discuss, bail out of the meeting.

Meeting Booking Process

Hiring Booking

All applicant bookings must be done through Greenhouse to keep the hiring workflow fully centralized. Ensure both the interviewer’s email and the candidate’s email are accurate before scheduling.

Always book the interview inside Greenhouse and send the meeting invite through Greenhouse so Google Calendar events and email notifications are automatically generated for both parties.

When creating interview events, make sure the calendar title clearly indicates:

  • The position the candidate is applying for
  • The stage of the interview (simple numbering is fine: 1, 2, etc.)

Event title examples:

  • [Candidate] x [Interviewer] – Frontend Engineer – Stage 1
  • [Candidate] x [Interviewer] – Customer Success Manager – Stage 2

This helps the CEO or next interviewer quickly understand the context and prepare.

Internal meetings will be requested by the CEO through Slack. Opening the calendar for both participants and schedule the meeting without checking on both sides.

For external 1:1 meetings, a meeting booking link is available. These links don't change, beware who these links are provided to.

Rescheduling Protocol

When a meeting needs to be moved:

  • Notify all participants.
  • Provide alternative time options (in CEO timezone).
  • Ensure buffer times remain intact.
  • Investor or board meetings may not be moved without direct CEO approval.
  • OOO boundaries must be respected unless the matter is urgent or board-related.