Are you running your company? Or is your company running you?

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 rea…