According to a Harvard Business Review survey, CEOs spend nearly 72% of their time in meetings and just 3% alone thinking or strategizing. That number should raise concern and prompt reflection.
If you’re constantly rushing from call to call, dealing with endless emails, and finishing your real work after hours, you are on a fast track to burnout. Time is your most valuable asset. The way you spend it not only reflects your priorities, but it also defines your legacy.
This guide is about redefining how high-level leaders like you think about time, energy, and performance.
Let’s dive into what actually works!
The Calendar Audit: Face the Truth About Where Your Time Goes
Let’s start with the hard truth: most leaders don’t actually know where their time goes.
They think they do. But until you sit down and look at a two-week spread of your calendar, color-coded by task type, it’s easy to assume you’re spending time on high-impact work. In reality, many executives are pulled into fires, approvals, and administrative clutter, things that feel important but rarely move the business forward.
A calendar audit means tracking every hour. What’s being spent on meetings? On Slack? In email threads that could’ve been a 5-minute phone call? How much of your day is spent in deep, strategic thought versus reactive execution?
Once you have the data, you can assess: what should be eliminated, delegated, or restructured? It’s not just about cleaning up a calendar, it’s about regaining control of your leadership presence.
Take control of your calendar and your leadership. Book a strategy session with Dr. Petra Frese, one of the most experienced executive coaches in the U.S.
Time Blocking and the Discipline of Deep Work
At the executive level, there’s no value in multitasking. In fact, it’s killing your clarity.
Time blocking is the practice of scheduling non-negotiable blocks of focused, uninterrupted time for your highest-value tasks. This isn’t the time you hope to use well; this is protected space for thinking, strategizing, reviewing, or making key decisions.
The most effective CEOs block 90-minute windows, typically early in the day when cognitive energy is at its peak.
This structure is essential because it forces priority discipline. If everything is urgent, nothing is strategic. Time blocking is about building guardrails around your genius work and making sure your leadership doesn’t get buried under the operational noise.
Strategic Delegation
If you’re the smartest person in the room, you’ve hired poorly. If you’re doing tasks someone else could do 80% as well as you, you’re not leading, you’re micromanaging.
Delegation is not about handing off work. It’s about multiplying your impact.
Using the Eisenhower Matrix, you can categorize every task into one of four quadrants:
- Urgent and important (do now)
- Important but not urgent (schedule it)
- Urgent but not important (delegate it)
- Neither urgent nor important (eliminate it)
Most executives are trapped in Quadrant 3, firefighting tasks that feel urgent but have no real strategic value. The result? You spend your day exhausted but unchanged.
Strategic delegation means building a team you trust, empowering them to lead, and reclaiming your time for CEO-level work: setting vision, developing leaders, and making high-stakes decisions that only you can.
Leverage Automation and AI to Eliminate the Mundane
You shouldn’t be scheduling meetings manually, toggling between time zones, or approving every single calendar invitation.
AI and automation tools have matured to a point where they can now handle the background noise that once consumed executive time.
This isn’t about outsourcing your intelligence. It’s about outsourcing your distractions.
By handing off the administrative load to systems, you reserve your mental bandwidth for real leadership, the kind that requires vision, intuition, and presence.
No-Meeting Zones: Designated Space for Strategic Thinking
You can’t lead from the middle of a Zoom marathon. Strategic clarity requires space, stillness, and distance.
Top executives are implementing “no-meeting zones”, entire mornings or even full days where meetings are banned. During these times, you work on the business, not in it.
What happens when you do this? Your decisions become clearer, your stress decreases, your creativity returns, and most importantly, you regain the mental space to think proactively rather than constantly reacting to problems.
Mastering the 80/20 Rule
According to the Pareto Principle, 80% of your outcomes come from 20% of your actions. So why are you still spending 80% of your day doing things that don’t deliver?
Every executive needs to regularly identify their top 3 high-impact activities, the things that truly drive business results. Then, make those your non-negotiables. Build your week around them.
This might mean:
- Spending time with your top 3 clients or investors
- Refining next-quarter strategy
- Mentoring your next senior hire
Everything else is noise.
The 30-Minute Rule
The most effective executives don’t take pride in long meetings. They take pride in efficient communication.
Shorten meetings. Aim for 30 minutes. Come in with a clear objective. Leave with a decision. The more time you allow, the more time gets wasted.
This doesn’t sacrifice depth. It demands clarity, and clarity is what your team craves from you the most.
Executive Coaching: Why Smart Leaders Ask for Help
Here’s the part no one tells you: even the best leaders hit a wall. And when you’re at the top, it’s lonely. You may have the title, the team, the pressure, but who’s helping you think?
That’s where executive coaching becomes invaluable. Not because you’re weak, but because you’re ready to be stronger.
An experienced coach offers more than accountability. They bring structured frameworks, outside perspective, and honest feedback that internal teams can’t always provide. They help you recognize patterns that drain your time and distort your focus.
They also identify where you’re reacting instead of leading, and help you build a system that reflects your highest priorities. Coaching also forces one crucial shift: from reactive urgency to intentional design.
Executive coaching helps you reclaim your time, so you can perform at your best, consistently and sustainably.
In Summary
How you manage your time shapes how you lead. When your days are ruled by urgency instead of intention, clarity and performance suffer.
You’ve seen the strategies, now it’s time to apply them with purpose.
If you’re ready to take control of your schedule and lead with more focus, energy, and impact, reach out to Dr. Petra Frese, one of the most experienced executive coaches in the U.S.
She’ll help you turn time from a burden into a tool for growth.
