The Startup Executive Who Time Blocks For Maximum Productivity

In 7 Hours With, we explore the routines of leading professionals in their space to learn the when, why, where and how they work. In each diary, we will look at what they’re doing at seven different check-ins throughout their day.

Hive is the project management tool that powers fast moving teams at places like Starbucks, Google, Comcast, Anheuser-Busch, Toyota and EA Sports. Want to learn more about how Hive can help your team? Contact our sales team here, or try a free trial here (no credit card required).

Gaurav Vohra is the Head of Growth and part of the founding team at Superhuman, the fastest email experience ever made. Superhuman helps you get through your inbox twice as faster as before. It comes equipped with AI, insights from social networks, follow-up reminders, scheduled messages, and more.

8:30 AM

I “technically” wake up at 6:00 when my partner’s alarm goes off, but I head back to sleep for a few more hours (I really should fix this). Realistically, I wake up sometime between 8:00 and 9:00, and after dealing with all of the necessary morning things, I’m ready to go around 9:00 AM.

9 AM

I like my time between 9:00 and 11:30 to be unbooked, which means no meetings. The reason for this is that it’s my most creative and most productive time. I think I work about two or three times as effectively in this block of time, and it feels like I can solve any challenge in this part of the day. 

For a bit of background on what I do, I’ve been with Superhuman since the very beginning. At present day, that means I’ve been with the company for about 5 years. Our company’s mission is to help professionals end each day feeling happier, more productive, and closer to achieving their full potential — we identify ourselves as a productivity company but also a wellness and communication company. 

The role that I play right now is Head Of Growth, which encompasses three main areas of the business.

The first area is marketing, which involves anything related to customer acquisition, converting users into paying customers, and increasing people’s interest in Superhuman.

Area two is onboarding. Superhuman has a pretty well-known and industry changing onboarding process. With each new customer, we spend time with them one-on-one for half an hour at the start of their experience. We’ve found that that has a pretty dramatic impact on customer success with the product and also the ability to be productive, form a connection with the company, and have long lasting success.

The third area that I lead is more general growth which does not fall into marketing or onboarding. This involves anything in the realm of strategy, product, design, engineering, and analytics, which are all quite separate from the marketing and onboarding portion.

I’ve worn a lot of hats as our needs have shifted over the last five years. But the thing that I find the most interesting, and that I’m the most passionate about, is the intersection between the business, our technology, and customers experiencing moments of joy.

11:30 AM

Right now, I have seven direct reports. Around this time of day, I’ve usually always got a one-on-one scheduled. For these meetings, I’m spending half an hour with folks (or longer if they’ve just joined the company). I like to stack those immediately before and after lunch. This is intentional, it allows me to go over if I need to with the person. We can extend by 5, 10 minutes, no big deal. 

12 PM

The whole company typically blocks 12:00 to 1:00 as lunchtime. I try to not work through lunch, unless there’s something that’s really urgent, which sometimes happens. But I really do like to have that time reserved.

In quarantine, it’s been a lot more difficult to not work through lunch. At the office, everyone would stop working, we’d all go to the lunch table, we eat for 40 minutes and then go for coffee. Lunch was a communal thing. But it’s harder now, but I attempt to remain intentional about this. 

1:30 PM

1:30 to about 3:00 is an open zone. I can fill that up with a series of half hour meetings, or I can also fill that up with individual contributor work. It can also be filled up with reviewing work from other folks on the team that they want to run past me before it ships.

As you can probably tell by now, blocking my calendar is my biggest productivity hack. If it’s not locked into my calendar, I’m generally speaking less effective in tackling that item. When I go to time block, I have lists of things I need to get done that go into my calendar, but I also have inbound streams that I need to address. Email is an inbound stream. Slack is an inbound stream — but I try to ask folks to not use Slack to assign chunky pieces of work (Slack is more of an FYI tool in my opinion). Meetings are another inbound stream. 

Finding and blocking individual slots for all of this inbound work is how I stay productive. More generally, I’ve always strived to stay aware of how productive I’m being. Early in my career, a mentor and friend of mine said something eye-opening. He noticed I was doing something really stupid — manually coalescing data across 40 spreadsheets. It was a spreadsheet per client, but the structure of the data was the same, and I was just manually copying the same row from like 40 different files into one file.

He told me: “There’s this mantra that you should really think about. If you’re doing something repetitive, you should get a computer to do that.” And then he showed me how to use VBScripts in Excel. With a little bit of tinkering, I managed to create like a little VBScript that did the work I was doing in seconds. From that point onwards, I’ve always kept in mind the question: “What am I doing here that’s repeatable, and how can I automate it to free up time?”

5:00 PM

Between 3 and 5 PM I typically have a few meetings. I do a lot of interviewing for open roles at Superhuman, and they often fall into this slot. To schedule them, we use a tool called Interview Schedule. It’s a software like Calendly that specializes in recruiting. And I leave my available hours of 3:00 to 5:00, meaning I have 2 hours set aside every day for phone interviews. This time slot works for me because I’m less productive on my own at this time, so it’s ideal for meetings.

I also do my skip level one-on-ones towards the end of this block. Usually, I’ll go for a walk outside when I’m on those calls. Afterwards, I face a choice — either I log off work for the night, or continue if I’m feeling productive. 

I work pretty long Monday – Thursday, I do not on Friday. If it’s a Friday, I clock off at 6:00 and set aside time with my partner and have some dinner. The backstory behind this routine is interesting. I have a theory that we were all trained by our first job — my first job was as a consultant. The world of a consultant is you traveled to the client’s office Monday through Thursday. You get a plane or a train first thing Monday morning, you come back Thursday night, and you’re very focused on work Monday to Thursday — but then Friday is almost like a holiday. That schedule is still stuck in my head a bit!

10 PM

Sometimes, I do find myself with these bursts of creative energy at strange hours in the evening — usually between 9:30 and 10:30. On certain days, I’ll have a productive burst at this time. Other days, I won’t.

During the week and at the very end of the day before bed I’ll spend half an hour winding down with a book, or zoning out with some YouTube, Twitter, or Netflix. Then my day is a wrap!