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4 Types of Professional Time to Leverage Your Energy

3 min read●Updated Oct 2026

Two weeks ago, during a strategic business review with one of our fastest-growing clients, they asked me a question that stopped me in my tracks:

“Mike, how do you manage your time to run Malloy Industries, coach CEOs, teach Georgetown students, be a present father/husband, AND still have time to think strategically?”

The answer? I don’t manage time. I leverage energy.

colorful weekly schedule with Monday to Friday labeled

4 Types of Professional Time

Here’s an overview of the 4 types of professional time

  • Management Time – #1 most common type of professional time. This is where you spend the majority of time in meetings, reading/sending emails, Slack messages, and people/project management.
  • Creative Time – 2nd most common type of professional time. Too often jammed between other things. It includes creating content, new products, coding, building the business machine, and doing the hard, deep work to build a thriving organization. You need to prioritize creative time and don’t let management time get in the way. This is what I was doing when I wrote this newsletter.
  • Ideation Time – The forgotten type of time. Thinking time. When new ideas are cultivated and grown. Brainstorming. Walking. Journaling. Reflecting. Sitting in the thinking chair. Stillness is key to asymmetrical growth. Without ideation time you’re stuck with linear growth.
  • Consumption Time – The 2nd forgotten type of time. It is where new ideas are planted. Reading. Listening. Group coaching. Studying. This is what I was doing when I jotted down notes that led to this newsletter.

“Everything you create is downstream from something you consumed. Creative Time requires quality upstream inputs from your Consumption Time.” – James Clear

digital weekly calendar displays a dense schedule with colored blocks

The Energy Calendar Audit (Takes 5 Minutes)

Pull up your calendar right now on another tab. Yes, right now. Go back to two weeks ago. Look at all your appointments and professional time blocks and update the color-coding for each block based on this system:

  1. Red: Management Time (meetings, reviews, decisions)
  2. Green: Creative Time (writing, strategizing, building)
  3. Yellow: Ideation Time (thinking, planning, brainstorming)
  4. Blue: Consumption Time (learning, reading, watching)

What patterns do you see?

Most CEOs we coach discover they’re drowning in red, with barely any green or yellow.

That’s a recipe for burnout.

Pro Tip: Block off time for your green creative work before 11 AM. Eliminate as many meetings as possible before 11 AM. Trust me.

Weekly schedule table with five columns for each weekday

3 Tips for Optimal Balance

  1. Batch Management Time. Create discrete blocks of time each day when you will handle major management tasks. 1-3 email processing blocks/day. 1-3 meeting blocks/day. 1-3 family blocks/day. Goal = don’t let the red management blocks bleed out across every day. You need to protect blocks of time for the other three.
  2. Increase Creative Time because it’s what propels us forward. Carve out time blocks for creative time. Don’t check your emails or messages during creative time. Get into flow and
  3. Create and protect space for Ideation Time and Consumption Time. These are forgotten times because we rarely created space for them, but they are critical to long-term compounding progress. History’s greatest leaders have all deliberately blocked time and space for reading, thinking, and creating the future.

Pro Tip: Start small with one block per week for Ideation Time and one for Consumption Time. You must learn to stay true to the focus of the small time block before you increase its size or add more time block

Here’s to making your time count,
Mike

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P.S. Whenever you’re ready, here’s how we can help:

  1. NEW Malloy Industries website explains how we give you immediate access to top-tier fractional executive talent
    who can start leading a department in days, not months, at a fraction of the cost of a full-time executive.
  2. On-Demand HR Director if you’re overwhelmed by personnel decisions, compliance risks, or manually processing payroll.
  3. Fractional Operations Executive if you’re spending too much time IN the business and not enough time ON the business.
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From my journey transitioning from consulting to entrepreneurship and adjunct professorship, I emphasize the critical role of fractional executives in scaling businesses through effective workforce planning, clear communication, and balancing strategy with execution for sustainable growth.

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