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As CEO of a small charity (30 staff), and now aged 51 I found that focussing on my retirement and what I want my legacy to be, has really helped me step back and see the big picture. You’re a bit younger than me @warzan, but I imagine your role may be a bit more specialised than mine, so it will probably all balance out!
My retirement may take a decade yet, but I want to be leaving the organisation in a healthy and forward-looking state, with a strong team taking it forward, so that on my final day at work (or hopefully sometime before) I am actually redundant because it runs like a smooth machine without me.
Needless to say, I am still a good way off that goal, but it is the project that I work on behind and at the core of pretty much every other project I work on. I have mentored younger staff, I have created new roles, I have brought in new ways of working all not only to benefit the business, but to benefit it in a way so that my presence is needed less, and I can focus more and more on strategy and less and less on operations.
The details are going to be very different between us, but I imagine that the concept of thinking about how you want your working life to look when you are 60-65 would give you a good goal to aim at so that you can prioritise what *really* matters, and help you move on from what is less important in the long run.
80% of our working time is consumed by the whirlwind of operational activity. As the Big Boss, your job is to try and get things to a stage where you can reduce that to 20%, so that it is easy to pass on. In doing that, you will find that it becomes easier to drop stuff that otherwise you might obsess about because you know in your heart that is not important enough to demand your time right now.
