How did Steve Jobs structure and spend his time to achieve greatness

How did Jobs get products out so fast, and how did he structure his weeks so he got the most innovation-output possible every single week. These are notes from my research on this, and not nesseccarily an article for you as a reader. It's more of a reminder to myself of a few guiding principles from one of the greats.

The Art of Saying No

Jobs was a world master in saying the word NO. It is reflected in how he scoped version 1 of things. He used aggressive timelines, this meant that scope had to be greatly reduced to a few things, the MOST IMPORTANT things that is. Otherwise they would not ship in time. An example of this is how the first iPhone shipped without copy pase, MMS, third party apps and video recording. SAY NO TO 1000 THINGS, do brutal scope cuts, and make sure that the features that survived the prioritization are done right!

He slashed priority lists at his yearly apple top 100 retreat, where he famously slashed a lot of the priorities, often from 10 down to 3. These retreats were important to set the vision and align on the mission, it was the time where he aligned the people at Apple on strategy. And he slashed things in the weekly Monday exec meetings too. This allowed Apple to actually finish through on stuff, and to do those selective things incredibly well.

He used to look in the mirror every day and ask "If this was my last day on earth, would I do what I am about to do today?", see the full speach here: exactly when he mentions this.

Where Jobs' Time Went

Where Jobs' time went and did not go. He delegated usual CEO things to Tim Cook, who owned operations, supply chain, manufacturing, logistics, and eventually sales and the Macintosh division after his 2005 promotion to COO. He hired Cook in 1998 specifically because operations "were a mess and he couldn't see how to fix them." This allowed Jobs to focus more on the product design direction, keynote speeches and public messaging, marketing and advertising, strategic portfolio decisions and top talent recruitment (he told TIME: "My #1 job here at Apple is to make sure that the top 100 people are A+ players). A players hire A players, thats why the top 100 HAD to be A+ players.

Daily Time Breakdown

Product reviews was the "red thread" that ran through almost every activity Steve did. Broken down in format rather than purpose here was how he normally split his time:
Formal and informal meetings 40-50% of his day. Hands on prototype review, including his designlab visits 15-20% of his time. Email and phone calls 15-20% of his time. And his last portion of time went into solo thinking or walking meetings.

Used timeblocking, and weekly meetings. His afternoon blocks were for email and calls, usually averaging 100 emails and 10 calls for Pixar and Apple during these afternoons. It is also where he would do 1 on 1 meetings, usually done while taking a walk with the person he met with.

His time did not really go anywhere else but to his family. He said "I have Apple, Pixar and my family". Translated into behaviour, he did not really do a lot other than work and spending time with his family. Had almost daily dinners with them, and often at home too.

The Weekly Agenda

The weekly agenda meetings was the Monday executive meeting he had with the executives at Apple. They discussed what and how much was sold last week, all the products in development, what troubles or problems they were facing, plus reviews of all the important stuff in motion.

Jobs set a written agenda for each meeting, and if one item was not finished it got pushed to the top of the agenda next week. There was also a max 2 week decision timeframe on decisions, which helped the efficiency of decisions and the velocity of which Apple shipped new products. Every agenda item had a DRI (direct responsible individual) next to its item. The agenda was usually 80% the same from week to week.

Powerpoints were a big NO! NO! NO! in these weekly meetings, due to Jobs being driven batty of people who used 20 slides to communicate something that could be said in 3 sentences.

Tim Cook usually held a Sunday night preparation meetings with all the execs, to prepare for the Monday morning meeting with Jobs.

Wednesday Marketing Reviews

On Wednesdays Jobs had the weekly meeting for marketing, communications and ad-reviews. This was with TBWA\MAL, Apples marketing agency. Wednesday meetings had a stricter agenda like the Monday exec meet. But every other week Jobs would hold a smaller, more informal meet with the marketing agency. Here he would share news, and review work in progress with the team.

The Rest of the Week

He visited the Industrial Design Lab almost daily, and ate lunch with Jony Ive, the lead designer at Apple almost every day. Apart from this there was no recurring theme for Tuesdays, Thursdays and Fridays during his last tenure at Apple. But these days could during sprints be filled up with a weekly recurring meeting. For example during the prototyping of the Apple Stores, Jobs set aside time every Tuesday to review the Apple Store progress and design with Ron Johnson the DRI of prototyping and designing the stores. He would even call him every day at 8pm, because Steve knew that Rons kids had gone to bed by then. The call was important to Jobs, because he wanted Ron to understand how Steve generally thought, and on a deeper level, because that would help Ron to intuitevly make design desicions of the store.

I might come back to this article to expand on it, but it was more of an active recall session for me. Also this way I can always come back to my notes to get a quick refresh of how Steve Jobs operated.