When Harvard researchers tracked 27 CEOs around the clock, the leaders worked 62.5 hours a week and spent 72% of their work time in meetings. Most of their time alone came in short pieces. Better time management for a CEO is less about working faster. It means protecting long blocks alone, shortening meetings and letting your direct reports own more of the work.
The numbers from the Harvard study
Michael Porter and Nitin Nohria of Harvard Business School started the study in 2006. Assistants logged each CEO's time in 15-minute steps, 24 hours a day, for 13 weeks. They published the results in How CEOs Manage Time, in the Harvard Business Review in 2018. A summary by MGMA lists the main figures:
- 62.5 hours of work a week on average, and 9.7 hours on a normal weekday.
- Work on weekend days, 3.9 hours on average, and on vacation days, 2.4 hours.
- 37 meetings a week, taking 72% of their work time.
- 61% of work time face to face, 24% on email and other electronic messages.
- 36% of their time spent reacting to things as they came up.
- 11% on routine duties such as reviews and board meetings.
- 6.9 hours of sleep a night and 45 minutes of exercise a day.
The rest of their work time, about 28%, was time alone. Fast Company's write-up notes that most of it came in blocks of an hour or less. The authors also suggested that many one-hour meetings could be 30 or even 15 minutes.
These were CEOs of large companies, so your week will look different. The pattern still holds for most leaders of a team: the calendar fills with other people's needs, and thinking time gets squeezed into gaps.
How this differs from managing your own time
If you work alone or with one helper, your problem is that everything depends on you. That is the subject of time management for business owners. Once you lead a team, the problem changes. Your hours go to meetings, questions and approvals. The skill is deciding which of those need you, and building a team that handles the rest.
Seven rules for a CEO's week
1. Book time alone first
Put two or three long focus blocks in next week's calendar before anything else goes in. Treat them like a client meeting. Use them for strategy, hiring plans, pricing and writing. A gap of 40 minutes between calls does not count.
2. Make 30 minutes the default meeting length
Change your calendar default from 60 to 30 minutes, or 25. Ask for a written agenda before you accept. If a meeting has no decision or update that needs you, send someone else or ask for notes. See this team meeting agenda for a format that keeps meetings short.
3. Work through your direct reports
In the study, 46% of the CEOs' time with employees involved one or more direct reports. Your direct reports are your main way to get work done. Give each one a regular one-on-one, a clear area to own and the authority to decide inside it. Every question you answer for them is a decision you could have handed over.
4. Plan for the unplanned
More than a third of the CEOs' time was reactive. That will be true for you too. Leave one or two open slots a day for urgent issues, so they do not eat your focus blocks. If nothing urgent comes, use the slot for email.
5. Shrink routine work every quarter
Routine reviews and reports took 11% of the CEOs' time. Look at your standing meetings and recurring reports once a quarter. Cancel what nobody uses. Turn status meetings into a short written update.
6. Batch email and messages
Pick two or three set times a day for your inbox. Turn off alerts during focus blocks. Tell your team how to reach you for something truly urgent, so they do not need to message you all day.
7. Protect sleep and exercise
The CEOs in the study averaged under seven hours of sleep. Long hours feel productive, but tired leaders make slower, worse decisions. Put exercise in the calendar the same way you put meetings in.
A one-week time audit
Before you change anything, find out where your time goes. Track one ordinary week in 30-minute blocks, then sort each block into a category.
For each 30-minute block, note one category:
- Direction: strategy, priorities, big decisions
- People: hiring, one-on-ones, coaching, team issues
- Customers: key clients, sales, partners
- Money: cash, pricing, budget, investors
- Meetings that did not need me
- Admin and inbox
- Reacting to problems
At the end of the week, answer:
- What share went to direction and people?
- Which three meetings could someone else attend?
- Which tasks did I do that someone on my team could do?
- How many blocks of two hours or more did I have alone?
If direction and people get less than a third of your week, start there. Pick the three easiest items from question 3 and hand them off this month. The guide on how to delegate tasks covers how to explain the work so it comes back right.
Red flags in a CEO's calendar
- You have no block of two hours alone in a normal week.
- Your team waits for you to approve small things.
- You attend meetings where you only listen.
- You answer messages late at night as a habit.
- You cannot name the three priorities you are working on this quarter.
Keep the system weekly
Time management slips without a weekly check. Spend 30 minutes at the end of each week on a short review: what got done, what slipped, and which meetings to cut next week. This weekly review template gives you the questions. If your priorities are unclear, start with how to set business goals.