Microsoft’s former CEO Steve Ballmer (recently replaced by Satya Nadella is generally viewed as rather less geeky than founder Bill Gates. But there’s one area of his career where he clearly embraced the geek approach: using a spreadsheet to ensure he balanced work with other commitments.
In an interview with the dean of Oxford’s school of business, Ballmer said that carefully tracking time was a key strategy:
I kept a spreadsheet, a budget, of my time. How many nights am I going to travel? Be away from family? How do I allocate the time I have left?
What’s often unsaid with these kinds of proclamations is that it’s far easier to refuse something based on family commitments when you’re the boss. Nonetheless, keeping track of time this way will let you know if you are devoting too much energy to work, and not enough to everything else.
Steve Ballmer’s Secret For Balancing Work And Family: Use A Spreadsheet [Business Insider]
Comments
4 responses to “How Steve Ballmer Used A Spreadsheet For Work/Life Balance”
Because he didn’t know how to do it in Outlook?
And that explains why Outlook is so crap and Excel is so good. No wonder Microsoft is flagging, when their own CEO uses the wrong product.
Life lessons from a failed CEO. Excellent.
I’d suggest “failed” is a serious stretch.