Red, Blue, Black is a framework for auditing your time. It was introduced to my at a dinner I attended and it resonated immediately.
Red, Blue, Black
One of my biggest distractions over the years has been emails and DMs. I have wasted hours for weeks replying to too many messages out of guilt because I don’t want to seem unresponsive. It was a mistake and led to even more hours wasted often with meetings that were often not critical to me achieving my mission.
Nowadays I block time in my calendar to protect time for creativity and for making. You can see below what a typical Monday looks like for me:
- Drop my daughter to school (yellow)
- Time protected for learning and creating new content (orange)
- Lunch (yellow)
- Pick up daughter from school (yellow)
- Free time to work on any priorities.
- No meetings to continue with priorities (grey)
Every 6 months I review my calendar to understand what I spent time on. I use a Time Audit framework called Red, Blue and Black which looks at:
- Red: Productivity – Cost to the business (like admin tasks, emails etc)
- Blue: Revenue – Money today (like sales, new features or a new cabin available to book)
- Black: Strategy – Money in the future (marketing strategy, business development etc)
I automate, create systems and outsource as much as possible in the red, so that I can spend as much time in Black and Blue as possible.
Too Much Red, Blue or Black
If you have too much red, do everything in your power to get Red time under control. If your calendar is unbalanced towards Red, you are sacrificing short-term revenue (Blue) and future revenue (Black).
Delegate or consider outsourcing the Red if possible.
If you have too much black, you could be taking your eye off money today (Blue) and therefore could be running out of runway (how many months of money you have in the bank).
Block intentional time in the calendar every two weeks to pause and reflect (Black).
Aim to spend more time every 6 months to consider where you can work more efficiently and how best to plan your time in your 6-month roadmap.
Don’t spend so much time visualising the future that you forget about your priorities today.
Make Red, Blue, Black a part of how you operate at least yearly. As a founder, you should be prioritising Blue time to ensure the business can reach sustainability. However, the more senior you get, the more you need to spend time in the Black. This enables you to shift from working in the weeds of the business to working on the business.
My discipline hack is ‘time blocking.’ I create meetings with myself for hours to allow me to think, research, create and work independently without distraction and use Calendly to allow people to wrestle for time with my limited slots. Then anyone who books a coaching call or joins the membership always gets priority support and responses.
Let me know if you give this framework a try.