time management clock (Credit: Photograph by Krisztian Bocsi — Bloomberg via Getty Images)Good morning.
Electronic communications have taken over most people’s lives, but for CEOs, face time still rules. A study of how CEOs spend their time, by Harvard’s Michael Porter and Nitin Nohria, found 61% of it is in face-face-meetings. “Face-to-face time is viewed as a signal of what or who is important,” Porter and Nohria write. While some CEOs have begun to use videoconferencing as an alternative, they “must never forget that at its core their job is a face-to-face one.”
The two professors collected data on 27 big-company CEOs (average annual revenue = $13.1 billion) over a three month period, asking their executive assistants to track time use in 15 minute increments. The study was published yesterday by Harvard Business Review
CEOs in the study worked an average of 62.5 hours per week. Even on weekends, they put in an average of 3.9 hours daily; on vacations, they averaged 2.4 hours a day.
The CEOs slept on average 6.9 hours a night.
The vast majority of CEO work time (75%) was scheduled in advance. Only 24% was available for spontaneous interaction.
CEOs spent 72% of their time in meetings, with one hour being the most common meeting length. (One CEO’s advice for time management: cut all meetings in half.)
CEOs spent 70% of their time dealing with employees, and only 3% of their time with customers—less than the 5% they spent with consultants or the 5% they spent with board members. Bankers, who seem to be claiming the lion’s share of my time these days, got 2%.
. A few takeaways:
Porter and Nohria asked each of the CEOs to describe the agenda he or she was pursuing, then tracked how much time they spent on activities that supported that agenda. The result: CEOs on average spent 43% of their time on activities that furthered their agenda. But that result varied greatly among the group, ranging from 14% to 80% of the leader’s work hours. Exercise time also varied greatly among the CEOs, suggesting the notion of CEO as “corporate athlete” has not yet fully taken hold.
More news below.
Sign up to read this article
Read news from 100’s of titles, curated specifically for you.
