Are executives over-scheduled or under-planned?

Both, but in different directions. Most executives have too many operational meetings and not enough protected time for strategy. The problem is not the volume of work — it is the category distribution.

What does poor executive calendar planning actually cost an organization?

The research suggests it correlates with weaker firm performance, slower strategic adaptation, and leadership teams that receive less coaching and development. The costs are long-horizon and therefore largely invisible until they compound into crises.

Is it realistic for a CEO to have 40% strategy time?

It depends on the organization's maturity and health. A CEO managing a crisis will rationally shift more time to Operations. But as a steady-state target for a functioning organization, 40% strategic time is supported by the research on high-performing CEOs.

Why do executives keep accepting low-value meetings?

Several reasons: social reciprocity, organizational norms of presence, difficulty distinguishing urgent from important in real-time, and the absence of a systematic review that would make the pattern visible.

Why CEO Calendars Are Underplanned (And What That Actually Costs)

The common complaint about executive life is that there is too much to do. The calendar is too full. The meetings never stop.

That is true, but it is not the actual problem.

The actual problem is that executive calendars are profoundly underplanned — not because they lack events, but because the events that matter most are either absent, insufficiently protected, or treated as interchangeable with the events that matter least.

A packed calendar and an underplanned calendar are not opposites. They can be exactly the same calendar.

The Myth: Senior Leaders Are Too Busy to Plan

A widespread belief about executive roles is that planning is a luxury — something that happens in business school and in books, but that real operational pressure squeezes out. The calendar fills itself with legitimate demands, and the executive’s job is to navigate that reality rather than resist it.

This framing is wrong in a specific and consequential way.

Porter and Nohria’s year-long study of 27 US CEOs found that CEOs worked an average of 62.5 hours per week across 230 working days. These leaders were not struggling to find work to do. They were spending those hours on meetings (37 hours per week), emails, phone calls, and travel. Only 15% of those hours — roughly 9 per week — went to thinking, reading, and strategy work.

The implication is uncomfortable: the busyness is real, but it is busyness concentrated on the wrong activities.

Bandiera, Hansen, Prat, and Sadun’s 2020 Harvard study of Italian CEOs reached a similar conclusion. CEOs who spent more time on strategy, multi-stakeholder engagement, and people development were associated with significantly better firm performance. The high-performing CEOs were not working more hours — they were spending existing hours differently.

Neither study suggests that operational work is unimportant. Operations is how the existing organization functions. The finding is about proportion: when Operations crowds out Strategy and People development in the executive calendar, something measurable and significant is lost at the organizational level.

What “Underplanned” Actually Means

An underplanned executive calendar has a specific structure. It is not empty — it is dense with commitments that arrived by default rather than by design.

The pattern looks like this:

Reactive scheduling dominates. Most events on the calendar were added in response to someone else’s request — a direct report, a functional leader, a board member, a customer. The executive accepted or was scheduled into them. The strategic blocks, the thinking time, the developmental conversations — these were the ones that required initiative, and initiative is the resource that operational demand erodes fastest.

Urgency wins every head-to-head. When a strategic thinking block and an urgent operational request occupy the same time slot, the operational request wins. Not because it is more important, but because it has a visible stakeholder, a deadline, and a consequence for declining. Strategy’s costs of displacement are deferred and diffuse. That asymmetry means urgency wins by default in any unmanaged system.

Protection is nominal. Many executives have nominally blocked time for strategy or development. These blocks exist on the calendar, but they are treated as movable — the first thing shifted when the week gets compressed. A block that moves is not a protected block. It is a placeholder that signals intention without providing the structural commitment that makes intention reliable.

The week is planned in hours, not categories. Most calendar management asks: “What do I need to attend this week?” The right executive planning question is: “What percentage of this week will go to Strategy, People, and Operations, and is that allocation consistent with where my leverage is highest?”

The Specific Costs of Underplanning

These costs are long-horizon and therefore easy to rationalize away. They do not appear in this quarter’s earnings or this week’s operational metrics. They accumulate and then compound.

Strategic underinvestment. Decisions about product direction, capital allocation, and competitive positioning require extended thinking time that reactive calendars cannot provide. The strategic work that needs two focused hours gets compressed into 20-minute windows between meetings, which produces analysis that looks thorough but lacks depth. Over time, the organization’s strategic bets reflect the quality of the thinking time its executives actually had, not the quality they intended to have.

Leadership team underdevelopment. People development — genuinely developmental coaching conversations, not status updates labeled as 1:1s — requires an executive who is present, curious, and not preparing for the next meeting. When the People category of the executive’s time is crowded out, direct reports receive operational management but not developmental leadership. The capability of the leadership team three years from now depends substantially on the quality of the developmental time the executive invests today.

Decision quality degradation. The 2020 Bandiera et al. research noted that higher-performing CEOs spent more time in what the researchers called “high-quality interactions” — planned, substantive engagements on significant topics — versus fragmented, reactive ones. Decision quality degrades when executives make consequential calls in compressed windows with incomplete thinking. The errors this creates are often attributed to bad luck or poor information, when the actual cause was insufficient thinking time.

Organizational imitation of the CEO’s calendar. Organizational culture tends to mirror what the CEO models. An executive whose calendar is dominated by reactive operational meetings sends an unambiguous signal about what seriousness looks like in this organization. Over time, that signal shapes how every leader below the CEO allocates their own time.

The Three Myths That Enable Underplanning

Myth 1: “I’ll protect strategy time once things settle down.”

Things do not settle down. Organizational operational pressure is not seasonal — it is structural. The executive who waits for a period of calm to begin strategic planning is waiting indefinitely. The only way to protect strategy time is to place it on the calendar before operational demands claim the slot.

Myth 2: “My calendar reflects what matters most.”

It reflects what generated the most scheduling pressure in the preceding weeks. That is not the same thing. The most strategically significant decisions in an organization often involve no deadline, no stakeholder complaint, and no visible urgency — which means they generate no scheduling pressure. They can remain perpetually deferred.

Myth 3: “I think strategically throughout my day, not in specific blocks.”

This may be partially true for highly experienced executives in familiar industries. But cognitive science research on sustained reasoning is fairly clear: complex judgment tasks — the kind that underpin real strategic decisions — require extended, low-distraction engagement. Interspersing strategic reflection between operational meetings produces strategic intuitions, not strategic analysis. Both have value, but they are not equivalent.

What Planning Actually Looks Like for Executives Who Do It Well

The executives who avoid chronic underplanning share a few observable practices.

They have an explicit allocation target — a stated position, reviewed quarterly, on what percentage of their hours should go to Strategy, People, and Operations. The CEO Time Triangle (40/35/25) provides a reasonable starting point.

They review allocation weekly, not just intention. The weekly check is not about guilt — it is about pattern detection. If three consecutive weeks have drifted to 65% Operations, that is data that demands a response.

They have made the enforcement infrastructure explicit. Their EA or Chief of Staff has a written brief on which blocks are protected, which can flex, and what language to use when requests land on protected time. The plan lives in the calendar and in the operating norms of the scheduling system.

And they have stopped treating strategic thinking blocks as aspirational. Strategy time is a fixed commitment, like a board meeting — not a wish that gets crowded out when the week fills up.

The diagnosis for your own calendar is simple: look at the past two weeks and classify each event as Strategy, People, or Operations. Calculate the percentage split. If the result does not match your stated priorities, you have an underplanning problem — and now you have the data to fix it.

Tags: CEO calendar planning, executive time management, strategic planning executives, CEO time use, underplanning

Frequently Asked Questions

Are executives over-scheduled or under-planned?

Both, but in different directions. Most executives have too many operational meetings and not enough protected time for strategy. The problem is not the volume of work — it is the category distribution.
What does poor executive calendar planning actually cost an organization?

The research suggests it correlates with weaker firm performance, slower strategic adaptation, and leadership teams that receive less coaching and development. The costs are long-horizon and therefore largely invisible until they compound into crises.
Is it realistic for a CEO to have 40% strategy time?

It depends on the organization's maturity and health. A CEO managing a crisis will rationally shift more time to Operations. But as a steady-state target for a functioning organization, 40% strategic time is supported by the research on high-performing CEOs.
Why do executives keep accepting low-value meetings?

Several reasons: social reciprocity, organizational norms of presence, difficulty distinguishing urgent from important in real-time, and the absence of a systematic review that would make the pattern visible.