Most time-management advice is written for someone with one job. Founders have 10-15 implicit jobs (sales, product, hiring, ops, finance, customer support, fundraising, marketing, legal, admin). The six below address that specific reality.

1. Protect one deep-work block per day

Not two, not three — one. Founders who protect a daily 2-3 hour block for the one thing only they can do tend to ship. Founders who fragment that block across five "priorities" don't.

2. Run a weekly "theme day" cadence

Monday = sales, Tuesday = product/engineering, Wednesday = team, etc. Jack Dorsey's old pattern; it's still useful. The point is to batch context-switching rather than spray it across the week.

3. Office hours for the team

Two weekly slots for team questions. This single discipline collapses the drip-interruption pattern that destroys most of a founder's deep-work capacity.

4. Delegate by decision, not by task

Don't delegate "do X." Delegate "own the outcome of Y; here are the constraints." Task-level delegation is still your work, just routed. Outcome-level delegation actually frees time.

5. The "unimportant urgent" quadrant is where founders drown

Press requests, investor intros that go nowhere, urgent operational fires that don't need you specifically. Say no, delegate, or schedule — don't default-accept.

6. One hour of strategic solitude a week

Not email, not meetings — literal time alone to think about the company's direction. The best founders schedule this; the struggling ones never get to it. It's the most leveraged hour you'll spend.

These six tactics compound. A founder who runs all six gets roughly twice the useful output of one who runs none, without working more hours.