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An Exact Breakdown of How One CEO Spent His First Two Years of Company Building
TL;DR: Sam Corcos tracked every 15-minute increment of his time as CEO of Levels for 2 years. Key findings: CEOs should primarily be information routers who unblock others rather than having their own deliverables. He recommends killing to-do lists and using calendars instead, which reduced his anxiety and improved commitment tracking. Communication (3-4 hours of email daily) is the main CEO job, not an afterthought. He advocates for asynchronous communication via email over Slack, batching email delivery to twice daily. The CEO role oscillated dramatically between engineering, sales, and fundraising as company needs shifted.
Key Insights
- CEOs should be information routers who unblock others rather than having their own deliverables
- Using calendar as to-do list instead of traditional to-do lists reduced anxiety and improved realistic capacity planning
- 3-4 hours of email processing daily is necessary - communication is the main CEO job
- Building fire departments is the CEO job, not putting out fires yourself
- Most seemingly urgent interruptions would not be the decision that killed the company if viewed from a year out
Actionable Takeaways
- Replace your to-do list with calendar blocking - assign every task a specific time slot to enforce realistic capacity
- Block 3-4 hours daily for email processing and treat communication as your primary deliverable
- Use asynchronous communication tools and batch email delivery to twice daily to reduce compulsive checking
- Ask yourself: If we looked back in a year, is this the decision that killed the company? If no, deprioritize
- Make yourself redundant by handing off recurring deliverables to team members or new hires
Principles Validated (3)
Founder Mindset
Read full article on review.firstround.comAdded Feb 15, 2026