As CEO, you technically get to spend your workdays however you see fit.
Yet somehow, you have no time.
You find yourself answering emails at 10 p.m. Your calendar is booked solid up to the holidays. The crises never seem to stop.
Many CEOs I talk to feel like they haven’t had an uninterrupted hour to think in months.
This is what it looks like to be run by your company. Which is, of course, the opposite of what should be happening.
It’s not just you.
In a popular 2018 article in Harvard Business Review, Michael Porter and Nitin Nohria tracked CEOs around the clock for 13 weeks. They found:
72% of CEO work time was spent in meetings, with 37 meetings per week on average
36% of CEO time was spent in reactive mode, handling issues as they unfolded (a.k.a. firefighting)
When CEOs did get time alone to think, 59% of it came in fragments of an hour or less.1
A separate study found that 96% of senior leaders report experiencing burnout. Nearly half say it damages their personal relationships.2
It’s really an epidemic of CEOs trapped in a pattern that keeps them so busy they aren’t leading.
They are thrashing in the present rather than - to quote the title of this very Substack - managing the future.
“A CEO’s schedule . . . is a manifestation of how the leader leads and sends powerful messages to the rest of the organization.”
—Michael Porter & Nitin Nohria in HBR
Driven by interruption
In The Hard Thing About Hard Things, Ben Horowitz describes the phenomenon:
When I was managing thousands of people at Hewlett-Packard after the sale of Opsware, there was an incredible number of incoming demands on my time. Everyone wanted a piece of me. Little companies wanted to partner with me or sell themselves to me, people in my organization needed approvals, other business units needed my help, customers wanted my attention, and so forth. As a result, I spent most of my time optimizing and tuning the existing business. Most of the work that I did was “incoming.”
Incoming work has a dangerous property: it expands to fill all available time.
Horowitz contrasts this “incoming” style of work with what was required of him as a startup executive, where “nothing happens unless you make it happen.”
That’s exactly right, and even if you’re CEO of a large public company, your ability to keep that startup mindset predicts your success.
It’s easy to sit back and become a firefighter, a router, a bottleneck, a pinch-hitter. But that’s not doing CEO work.
Don’t get me wrong, CEO work is hard.
Joseph Badaracco writes that “thinking deeply isn’t easy. It takes time and imagination, empathy and compassion.” He’s describing why firefighting so often wins. Strategic thinking is uncomfortable. It requires you to sit with uncertainty, to hold multiple futures in your head, to make bets before you have full information. Answering the 147 emails in your inbox is concrete, completable, and feels like progress.
(PS: If you do become the firefighter, always-busy, burnt-out CEO, you create a second problem: your team learns to operate the same way. Bill Gates admits he used to prowl Microsoft’s parking lot on weekends to see who showed up. He didn’t believe in vacations and drove his team relentlessly. Later, he admitted he’d had to learn to be “careful not to apply my standards to how hard others worked.” You can burn out your whole organization in the process of burning yourself out.)
So what do I do?
The solution isn’t better time management tips. It’s blocking out CEO time—a non-negotiable refuge in your calendar where you do the work only you can do.
Inside that refuge:
You delegate ruthlessly. If someone else can handle it 80% as well as you can, it’s not yours anymore. And before you delegate something, ask yourself candidly whether it needs to be done at all.
You look at the Gestalt of the company and how its six core areas are interacting. Which of those six wheels is turning slowest?
You look ahead. Where is the company actually going? What decisions do you need to make now to achieve strategic objectives for the next 2–3 years?
You think. Not in stolen moments between meetings or while half-reading emails. Real, sustained, uncomfortable thinking about hard problems. What big threat or opportunity are you missing? What recent learning can you apply to your role or the company?
Start with just 15 minutes of CEO time each day. Protect it like you’d protect a board meeting.
No one gets to book over it. No “quick questions.” No exceptions.
The result of well-spent CEO time is LESS on your plate, with the remaining items being the most important ones. Then you get to be, as my friend Jim Schleckser says, lazy.
Final thought: Slow is smooth, smooth is fast
The Navy SEALs have a saying: “Slow is smooth, smooth is fast.”
In combat operations, rushing causes mistakes that cost far more time than moving deliberately. Taking an extra second to aim correctly beats missing and having to take three more shots.
Strategic thinking feels slow, because it is.
You’re not checking things off a list or making people happy or resolving immediate crises. You’re doing something harder: i.e., figuring out what actually matters.
When you skip this work to chase the urgent, you end up fixing problems that never should have existed and compromising other parts of your life that matter.
If you’d like to talk about how to get your time back, I’m offering a few complimentary CEO advisory calls this month. Schedule a time with me here.
Michael E. Porter and Nitin Nohria, “How CEOs Manage Time,” Harvard Business Review, July-August 2018
“Executive Burnout Statistics 2025: A Look Into the Leadership Crisis,” Superhuman Blog, June 11, 2025.
Great piece. I'd never heard “Slow is smooth, smooth is fast" before, but I love it.