427: Build a Schedule You Want with Sarah Olivieri

Episode Description

Most nonprofit leaders are running a calendar built out of obligations they accepted on autopilot. The board asks. The donor meeting. The standing call that has been on the schedule for so long nobody can remember why. The week fills up, and the week after that, and the work that actually energizes the leader gets squeezed into whatever is left. Which is usually nothing.

Sarah goes solo in this episode to walk through how to design a schedule around energy and alignment, drawing on the way she has run her own organization on roughly sixteen hours a week for a decade.

In This Episode, You'll Learn

• Why every yes on the calendar is also a no to something else, even when nobody names it out loud

• The exercise of designing your week, starting from what energizes you, not from what is already on the calendar

• Why blocking the time you actually want is step one, and figuring out how to make it work is only step two

• What happens to output when leaders move into the work that fits, and why energy is a multiplier on time

• The line between obligation and alignment, and how to tell which one is driving a given commitment

Who This Episode Is For

This episode is especially helpful for:

• Executive directors whose calendars are full but whose mission is not advancing at the pace they want

• Nonprofit leaders heading into a new quarter or year and ready to set the rhythm differently

• Leaders running on willpower instead of structure, who suspect the schedule itself is the problem

• Anyone who has ever said yes to a recurring commitment and then resented it every time it landed on the calendar