Shadowing Practice: How To Manage Your Time Like a CEO - Learn English Speaking with Video
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If you want to manage your time like the top 1%,
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you need to stop following the same old productivity advice and start using a system that rewires your brain.
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As a CEO, board member, and investor at some of the fastest growing companies, my life was a firefight for years.
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Every second mattered.
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I had to make time for what drives results, cut distractions, and stay in control when things got chaotic.
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Today, I'll share a simple system I used.
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Borrow what works for you so you can make time for what matters to you.
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But before you apply this system, there's one question that can help you cut through the avalanche of online advice.
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Everyone has the same 160 hours per week, right?
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Why do the top performers get dramatically more done without burning out?
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Jack Dorsey can run
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Twitter and Square simultaneously.
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In the same week you and I have, Elon Musk runs more than two companies.
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Same number of hours.
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These CEOs don't manage time.
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They manage their attention.
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If you just focus on the tactics of managing time, like batching and prioritizing and time blocking, that's great.
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But you will still miss the big picture.
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It's about applying what I call the 3 -2 -1 system.
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Here's how to do it.
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The first part of the system is the three roles.
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Most people fail at productivity because they're playing the wrong game for their level.
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Taylor Swift is a perfect example.
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In the early days, she wrote songs and she recorded songs.
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Today, she has to write, produce, record, perform, make music videos, run business operations, do philanthropy,
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manage brand partnerships, all of it while managing a global tour schedule.
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The time management system that worked for her early on would kill her productivity completely today
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because her game has changed and her role has changed.
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How she manages her time has to be completely reinvented.
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Marshall Goldsmith says the right thing.
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What got you here won't get you there.
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Habits that tend to work in simple phases of life actively harm you
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when you graduate to a role that demands complex responsibilities.
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That's what CEOs learn the hard way.
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If you want to manage your time like the 1 % elites, you have to understand the role you're playing right now.
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And there are three roles.
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Maker, marker, multiplier.
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First, maker.
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This is relevant when you're juggling handful of priorities or if you're an individual contributor.
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Your role mostly requires that you do everything yourself.
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Stay in late, stay in your lane, heads down, deep work, details, diligence.
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You have clear deliverables, clear timelines.
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Your time management has to build with that role in mind.
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Now, there are tons of folks I know around the world who love staying in
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that role throughout their entire career in tech, in finance, in pharma, research, several other verticals.
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And it's a totally acceptable path for time management and career management if that's what lights you up.
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But then some of you will want to graduate from maker to marker role.
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Now you have to manage 10 to 20 priorities in life all at once.
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You start managing a team.
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Maybe you have a life partner or a family.
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So in this phase, you can't touch every single thing on your own every single time.
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And you shouldn't.
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Think of it this way.
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You are transitioning from the maker to the marker mode.
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Everybody else in your team will produce research, code, business plans, whatever they're working on.
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But you are the marker.
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You're the editor.
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You give feedback.
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You give comments to refine their work.
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You don't take their work and start rewriting.
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You build processes that automate everything.
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You're doing and you're also delegating.
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That's the mix.
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The challenge in this phase is to understand what you can delegate and where you have to invest your own time.
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Anything that's mission critical to your project or your company or your brand, that's where you need to be totally hands -on.
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And from there, you graduate to the third role, the multiplier role.
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That's when you have 30, 40, 50 responsibilities.
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You're managing a very large team.
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In this phase, you have to become what
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Eric Schmidt calls the most expensive router
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because your job is not to create your job is not to review what other people create.
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Your job is to recruit, orchestrate, and align your team.
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You focus on connecting people.
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You make strategic bets.
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You route requests from one corner to the other corner of your team.
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You have to stop obsessing over every little detail and focus on the big picture.
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Taylor Swift, again, is a great example.
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Her early career was about being a maker.
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Today, she's a maker in music, but she's a multiplier across the rest of her life.
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The core insight here is that if you don't know what role you're playing, you'll manage your time the wrong way.
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Delegating when you're a maker and micromanaging when you're a multiplier are both recipes for failure.
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You, of course, have to come up with tricks and techniques to manage your time better, but only after you know what role you're in.
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Otherwise, your calendar will fill fast with the wrong things and you won't get anything done.
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Or, more alarmingly, no one around you will get anything done either.
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But the way you manage your attention is not just about the role you play.
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It's also about which zone you're in.
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The second part of the system is about two zones.
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Airbnb's founder almost killed the company by following textbook time management advice.
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So from 2016 to 2020, Airbnb's founder, Brian Chesky, did what every business school,
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every business book, and every VC will tell you to do hire great people and get out of their way.
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Let them do their magic.
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Nothing wrong with that advice because when he was doing that, the business was growing.
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Brian was enjoying the multiplier role.
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But around year 2020, Airbnb's growth started slowing down.
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Costs started exploding.
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COVID had changed the dynamics of every business, including Airbnb.
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Chesky had to make a difficult decision step in, get his hands back on the wheel, and steer the ship through the icebergs.
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He removed layers of leadership to make the company lean and flat.
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He got deeply involved in product, in every critical decision, every important detail.
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And the result?
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The company delivered over 500 product improvements in just three years.
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Airbnb went back to being a profitable company.
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That's how the zones affect your time management and your priorities.
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There are two zones, wartime and peacetime.
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When Airbnb was collapsing, that was wartime.
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That's when you have to roll up your sleeves and get in there.
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Once the company stabilizes, step back again, become a multiplier.
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The key insight is that your zone dictates your role.
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War time zone can force you to move from a multiplier to a marker or from a marker to a maker.
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Your system has to be this dynamic.
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You've got to know which zone you're in and act accordingly.
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When you're building a startup or when you're in a tough market or swimming in the red ocean with sharks, it's war time.
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And when you're in war time, all bets are off.
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But even if you master your role and your zone.
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There is one final piece that separates the top 1 % from everyone else.
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The third and final piece of the system is the one non -negotiable.
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I've seen many CEOs struggle with this until one brutal question changes everything.
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When I served as the CEO of our AI company a few years ago, I had a great team,
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the timing was great, and we had a great product.
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So we were one of the top 20 fastest growing tech companies in the US, according to Deloitte Fast 500.
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And we were absolutely in war time zone.
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Every day was just plain chaos.
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And every night I would stay up wondering if we can hire the right people fast enough,
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whether our customers were delighted to have us as their partners.
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And then I started realizing that I was becoming a bottleneck in every decision.
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I had to ask myself that one question.
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What is the one thing that only I can do?
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That one thing I should focus on while I delegate everything else.
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And I thought about it and I realized that we were growing because of our mission.
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If I could focus on building relationships with our people and with our customers,
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then I could articulate our mission even more clearly.
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I focused on that one thing, relationships.
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On recruiting, on culture, on internal communication,
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on customer partnership, every touch point that helped me build the relationships.
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The rest of it, I delegated.
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I still had daily stand -ups with our C -level team.
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We had our weekly leadership meeting, product meetings.
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tech meetings, finance meetings.
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That's the operating rhythm of the company and you need that to build the execution muscle.
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But for me personally, my proactive focus was on that one thing that I couldn't delegate,
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which was building mission -driven relationships.
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Now, I'm not sharing this to show off or anything, but to showcase how you can put your CEO hat on.
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Your three -two -one system is about three roles, two zones, one non -negotiable.
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You have identified your one non -negotiable, but how do you actually delegate everything else without it all falling apart?
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The best leaders don't manage time, they manage trust.
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Steve Jobs and Johnny Ive are the gold standard when it comes to this.
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Johnny Ive was the chief design leader at Apple and he designed iPod and iPhone, iPad, Apple Watch.
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These were complex tasks, right?
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The designs had to be tasteful, but they had to keep in mind the cost.
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Cost of manufacturing, cost of supply chain, all of that.
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So Steve Jobs and Johnny would meet every day for lunch, and then they could go for a walk,
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and they would talk about business, design, aesthetics, art.
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Steve would ask deep questions.
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He would review everything.
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Every detail mattered to him.
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But here's the thing.
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Johnny never felt micromanaged.
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Why?
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Because Steve Jobs was there as a partner, not as a boss.
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He was in the details to learn everything, not to control everything.
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And that's what most people miss when they move from doing to delegating.
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Because leading is not about time management, it's about trust management.
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You review things, but to coach.
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You connect, but to provide context.
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You step in, but to unblock others.
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So your time management, outside of your own deep work, is spent on developing and managing trust.
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And how do you find the right rhythm for delegation?
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It depends on three things.
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If your teammate is new to the task, work alongside them.
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Build trust by giving comfort.
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If they have some experience, guide them closely, review steps, but build trust by giving clarity.
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And if they're experts, step into unblock.
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Build trust by giving context.
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That's what Steve Jobs was doing with Johnny Ive.
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If new hires get too much freedom, they will fail.
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And if experienced people get micromanaged, they will quit.
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You lose both ways.
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So that's trust management.
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Trust speeds up everything.
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And remember, you don't need to be a CEO or a founder to apply any of these ideas, right?
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You can still apply to your calendar with your teammate, to your roommate, your partner, your spouse, your kids, whoever.
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So here's what I would invite you to do this week.
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Pick any of the following.
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Define your role, name your zone, write your one non -negotiable, or delegate one repeatable task.
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And remember Remember the eternal principle.
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You cannot control time.
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You can only steward the time you have.
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In the end, good time management helps you make time for what matters to you personally, things that bring you joy and happiness,
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because your time is finite.
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If you liked this video, I hope you find time for another one here that I think you will enjoy.
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See you next week.
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Thank you and I love you.
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Vocabulary and speaking notes for this lesson
This speaking lesson is built on the video “How To Manage Your Time Like a CEO”. The speaker keeps coming back to these words: role, manage, zone, management, maker. This video has 192 sentences and 2031 words to shadow. The speech runs for 13:42. The speaker talks at a steady 148 words per minute, a comfortable pace for shadowing. 85% of the words are among the 3,000 most common in English; the rest is worth studying before you start.
Key vocabulary in this video
15 words from the video worth learning, with pronunciation and meaning:
| Word | Pronunciation | Meaning |
|---|---|---|
| delegate noun | /ˈdɛlɪɡət/ | A person authorized to act as representative for another; a deputy. |
| maker noun | /ˈmeɪk.ɚ/ | Someone who makes; a person or thing that makes or produces something. |
| marker noun | /ˈmɑː(ɹ)kə(ɹ)/ | A felt-tipped pen, a marker pen. |
| founder noun | /ˈfaʊ̯n.dəː/ | One who founds or establishes (a company, project, organisation, state, etc.). |
| priority noun | /pɹaɪˈɒɹɪti/ | An item's relative importance. |
| hire verb | /ˈhaɪɹ/ | To obtain the services of in return for fixed payment. |
| productivity noun | /ˌpɹɒdʌkˈtɪvəti/ | The state of being productive, fertile, or efficient. |
| partnership noun | /ˈpɑɹtnɚʃɪp/ | The state of being associated with a partner. |
| connect verb | /kəˈnɛkt/ | To join (to another object): to attach, or to be intended to attach or capable of attaching, to another object. |
| calendar noun | /ˈkæl.ən.də/ | Any system by which time is divided into days, weeks, months, and years. |
| insight noun | /ˈɪnsaɪ̯t/ | A sight or view of the interior of anything; a deep inspection or view; introspection; frequently used with into. |
| rhythm noun | /ˈɹɪð.əm/ | The variation of strong and weak elements (such as duration, accent) of sounds, notably in speech or music, over time; a beat or meter. |
| recruit verb | /ɹɪˈkɹut/ | To enroll or enlist new members or potential employees on behalf of an employer, organization, sports team, the military, etc. |
| teammate noun | /ˈtiːmˌmeɪt/ | One who is on the same team. |
| wartime noun | /ˈwɔː(ɹ)taɪm/ | A period during which a war is in progress in a particular place. |
Phrasal verbs you will hear
| Word | Meaning |
|---|---|
| burn out verb | To destroy by fire. |
| come up with verb | To manage to produce, deliver, or present (something) by inventing, creating, thinking of, or obtaining it. |
| cut through verb | To take a shortcut through. |
| fall apart verb | To disintegrate, to break into pieces. |
| get out of verb | To leave, exit or escape from; to become free of. |
| go back to verb | To stem from; to originate in. |
| roll up verb | To dominate by accumulating; to become dominant by accumulating. |
| show off verb | To exhibit the best attributes of something. |
Sentences worth repeating
Short, complete lines from the video that you can reuse in everyday conversation:
- Today, I'll share a simple system I used.
- What got you here won't get you there.
- You don't take their work and start rewriting.
- You're doing and you're also delegating.
- You're managing a very large team.
Grammar in this video
The structures the speaker uses most, with the exact words from the video:
| Structure | In the video |
|---|---|
| Conditional sentences if + clause, will/would + verb — a condition and its result | if experienced people get micromanaged, they will quit |
| Present perfect have/has + past participle — a past action that still matters now | has changed · I've seen · have identified |
Pronunciation to watch
The speaker uses 34 contractions and reduced forms, such as you're, don't, they're. Say them the short way, as you hear them.
- The “th” sounds: rhythm /ˈɹɪð.əm/, aesthetics /ɛsˈθɛt.ɪks/, philanthropy /fɪˈlæn.θɹə.pi/
- The “sh” and “zh” sounds: partnership /ˈpɑɹtnɚʃɪp/, transition /tɹænˈzɪʃ.ən/, execution /ˌɛk.sɪˈkjuː.ʃən/, delegation /dɛlɪˈɡeɪʃən/, showcase /ˈʃoʊˌkeɪs/
- Long words — get the stress right: priority /pɹaɪˈɒɹɪti/, productivity /ˌpɹɒdʌkˈtɪvəti/, execution /ˌɛk.sɪˈkjuː.ʃən/, acceptable /əkˈsɛp.tə.bəl/, simultaneously /ˌsaɪmlˈteɪnɪəsli/
How to practise with this video
- Listen to the whole video once without speaking and note the words you do not know.
- Shadow it sentence by sentence at normal speed, repeating each one until your rhythm matches the speaker.
- Record yourself and compare with the original, paying attention to words like delegate, maker, marker.
What is the Shadowing Technique?
Shadowing is a science-backed language learning technique originally developed for professional interpreter training and popularized by polyglot Dr. Alexander Arguelles. The method is simple but powerful: you listen to native English audio and immediately repeat it out loud — like a shadow following the speaker with just a 1–2 second delay. Unlike passive listening or grammar drills, shadowing forces your brain and mouth muscles to simultaneously process and reproduce real speech patterns. Research shows it significantly improves pronunciation accuracy, intonation, rhythm, connected speech, listening comprehension, and speaking fluency — making it one of the most effective methods for IELTS Speaking preparation and real-world English communication.