Author Archives: Rusty Rueff

About Rusty Rueff

Rusty Rueff, author of purposed worKING. Rusty Rueff is the former Chairman Emeritus of The GRAMMY Foundation in Los Angeles. He most recently completed the successful 16 month leadership role as Coordinating National Co-Chair for Technology for Obama (T4O) for the reelection of President Obama and ten-years of Board service and President of the Board of Trustees of the American Conservatory Theater in San Francisco. Corporately, most recently Rueff was the Chief Executive Officer at SNOCAP, Inc. until the acquisition of the company by imeem, Inc. in April 2008. Before joining SNOCAP in 2005, he was Executive Vice President of Human Resources at Electronic Arts (EA) from 1998 until 2005. He was also with the PepsiCo companies for more than ten years, with the Pratt & Whitney division of United Technologies for two years, and in commercial radio as an on-air personality for six years. Rusty holds an M.S. in counseling and a B.A. in radio and television from Purdue University. In 2003 he was named a distinguished Purdue alumnus, and he and his wife, Patti, are the named benefactors of Purdue’s Patti and Rusty Rueff School of Visual and Performing Arts. He is a corporate director of Glassdoor.com and runcoach. He is the co-founder and Executive Committee Member of T4A.org, serves on the Founding Circle of The Centrist Project and a founding Board Member of The GRAMMY Music Education Coalition. He is also the co-author of the book Talent Force: A New Manifesto for the Human Side of Business. Rusty and his wife, Patti, reside in Hillsborough, CA and Charlestown, R.I.

day 1120: Fully Scheduled


“May you experience the love of Christ, though it is too great to understand fully. Then you will be made complete with all the fullness of life and power that comes from God. Now all glory to God, who is able, through his mighty power at work within us, to accomplish infinitely more than we might ask or think.”

Something we all share equally is the amount of time in an hour.  No matter who you are, your position, or socioeconomic level, an hour is an hour.  Now what we do with it and how productive we are with that hour is not at all the same. There is a science and art to managing calendars and schedules. I have seen the most productive and I have seen some real disasters at managing a calendar.  I am pretty obsessive about my calendar and while not as disciplined about knowing when to say no, I do manage my schedule to my own level of fullness comfort, and sometimes beyond my comfort level.  I like a full schedule in that there is a certain level of productivity that comes with knowing that there is only so much time available to complete the tasks at hand.  We all have had the experience of what happens when the schedule is empty and at the end of the day, we say, “Where did that day go, I didn’t get anything done!”. Schedule fullness and is one that each need to learn and unfortunately it mostly comes with experience and the learning by trial and error.  A key lesson I have learned over the year is to always consider the other people involved so that whatever the decision is that the least amount of disruption to the schedules of others is the best course of action.  Constantly changing a calendar is not good for anyone.
A full schedule does not equate to the fullness of life. In fact, a fullness of schedule can be masking an emptiness of life. Consider that we can many times fill our days and hours with those things that take away our attention from the harder areas in our lives that need to be addressed.  We can find ourselves so busy with the everydays in life that we forget about the things that affect our ever after.  Our calendars and schedules can become so filled that we don’t look after our physical and spiritual well-beings.  Both, when denied take away from the fullness of life that we can experience.  Step back for a moment and look at the last month of your schedule, not to determine if it was full or not, but to determine if it was filled with the right things that you can say that was, “Time well spent”.
Reference: Ephesians 3:19-20 (New Living Translation)