We understand that time management for CEOs is complex. Being a business executive means you are naturally busy. But, being constantly busy is not something that must be accepted as truth when many time management methods are available for you to employ.

There are many tips about time management for executives like yourself. Some are easy changes, and some require big changes in how you work. But no matter what method you choose to use, we strongly believe that learning successful time management is a valuable skill.

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Why Executive Time Management Matters for Business Success 

CEOs specialize in strategy, but they should also possess strong time management skills. They must understand the principles of time management by employing methods to maximize their working hours. This is because effective executive time management influences productivity, which in turn directly impacts company performance.

Here’s how:

  • Focus on Strategic Activities: Effective time management enables CEOs and founders to appropriately distribute their energy across high-value initiatives, like strategy, partnerships, and innovation, that drive long-term growth, while also managing time-intensive tasks like email correspondence.
  • Less Distractions: Effective time management helps executives filter out interruptions by setting boundaries, delegating effectively, and streamlining communication. This enables them to focus, especially during stakeholder meetings, improving decision-making accuracy.
  • Reduced Stress and Burnout: Startup executives are often at risk of overcommitting as they pursue key investors and compliance approvals, which can expose them to burnout and decision fatigue. Executive time management strategies, like time blocking, allow them to plan for personal time to unwind, maintaining their mental sharpness.
  • Organized Schedule: Executives with structured, flexible calendars can respond quickly to changing priorities without causing scheduling bottlenecks. For example, they might reschedule a low-priority meeting to create time to meet a potential investor who has just come into town.
  • Improved Company Culture: Executives who manage their time well send a strong message to their workforce that the company prioritizes productivity and efficiency. This has a trickle-down effect on low- and mid-level managers, who in turn foster time management strategies, ultimately improving the company culture in the long term.
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How to Identify Key Priorities Being an Executive

According to a recent Microsoft study, users spend up to 57% of their time on meetings and email correspondence. An executive spending 20+ hours weekly on such tasks indicates poor time management, as they could redirect that time to pursuing the company’s high-level strategies.

To prevent that, here are some practical tips for prioritizing your executive schedule:

  • Align Priorities with Business Goals: Identify tasks that contribute directly to the company’s strategic objectives, such as revenue growth, innovation, customer retention, or operational efficiency. Ensure you allocate adequate time to such tasks to maximize executive impact.
  • Track Performance: Use relevant KPIs to identify where your input is needed the most. For example, a lower conversion rate indicates that you need to work closely with the sales team to understand the areas for improvement. You can prioritize this task over others that are performing well.
  • Review and Adjust Priorities: Assess emerging opportunities or risks and adjust your priorities to remain focused on the most critical initiatives. These include changes in consumer preferences or when competitors launch disruptive technologies that could threaten your market share.
  • Balance Urgency and Importance: Leverage tools like the Eisenhower Matrix to distinguish between what demands attention now and what drives long-term results. This helps you handle immediate pressures, such as product nonconformity or regulatory compliance issues, while remaining focused on core business functions.
  • Check What You Can Delegate: Identify tasks that a remote executive assistant can handle and what they cannot because of strategic impact. This separation helps you determine high-priority tasks that need your immediate or long-term attention.
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Time Management for CEOs: Tips and Strategies

Tips on managing your time effectively include the following:

Delegate Tasks

Letting go of particular duties is not easy, particularly for leaders who feel joy in being in charge. But those who understand how to delegate tasks are the ones holding the reins of success.

Decide cleverly. Understand that only a few duties truly need your attention, skills, and knowledge. Concentrate on these while you pass the rest to someone else. Spot tasks that are delegable without losing quality or critical decision creation. Great CEOs choose their battles wisely. 

They also choose their assistants carefully so that no regrets follow.  Look for people who are suitable for the job and give them tasks that match their abilities and skills. If there is a task that your team cannot handle, it may be necessary to outsource this task. You can always collaborate with an executive assistant who can help you with many administrative tasks among others.

Say ‘No’

Question the importance of your presence in meetings. Ask yourself: Is it necessary for me to participate, or can I receive a summary later? Will my non-attendance create an important barrier? Can I join only for a bit of the meeting? Also, work together with team members to plan certain days as meeting days and other days as non-meeting days for concentrated effort. This will give you more time for tasks that really make an impact and help in achieving your goals.

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Prioritize Strategies

It’s important to recognize the tasks’ distinctions. Efficient time management for CEOs relies on the ability to examine and classify tasks according to their urgency and importance. This helps guide executives in placing efforts towards tasks that carry significant impact.

You can use powerful tools such as the Eisenhower Matrix or ABC technique to prioritize your responsibilities. The matrix by Dwight Eisenhower, who was famous for being extremely productive as a past U.S. President, helps to separate tasks based on how urgent and important they are. 

On the other hand, the ABC method sorts tasks into groups from A (most urgent) to C (least urgent). Using this structure, leaders can first deal with tasks marked ‘A’ and then move on to less urgent ones. This method makes sure you don’t waste too much time on less important activities but concentrate your efforts where they really count.

Eliminate Distractions

Interruptions are unavoidable in the work days of managers, starting with new emails that continuously fill their inboxes to constant notifications on Slack and unplanned visits from employees. Although complete removal of distractions is not possible, it can be controlled via good management.

Create clear principles for you and your group to lessen interruptions. For instance, restrict checking emails at particular times of the day. Think about making time slots on your schedule as a CEO that are marked as “do not disturb” where you can concentrate on work. 

Understand Your Time

For better time management, become more conscious about how you use your time. Take note of what you do during a few days and study the data to comprehend where your valuable time goes. You might be astonished by finding out that only a small portion is devoted to genuinely productive tasks. After understanding this, start planning how to remove non-productive tasks and focus on what holds the most importance.

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Set SMART Goals

The word SMART is an acronym that means Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-bound. These goals are important because they provide you with clear objectives to aim for and guide where your efforts should be focused – on activities that directly contribute towards these aims. For instance, a general goal like ‘increase sales’ could be expressed as: “I will enhance sales by 10% in the next quarter.” This method helps you to observe progress, maintain responsibility, and confirm that your efforts are focused on valuable results.

Effective Communication

The thing that really makes a great leader stand out is their skill in creating relationships and keeping an open communication with their team. This not only supports the company but also helps these leaders to manage their time better and get more work done.

When leaders share their goals, strategies and difficulties with the team, they build trust and make it easier for everyone to comprehend the bigger vision as well as their individual part in that plan. If team members know about these details, they can better connect their work with what the organization is aiming towards and won’t be needing constant guidance. 

In the present digital era, using technology to create virtual collaboration is a big change in communication dynamics. Platforms such as Slack, Asana, or Trello provide effective methods for managing tasks and communicating instantly which greatly decreases unproductive meeting time.

While these strategies can help CEOs manage their time, they work best when principals partner with an executive assistant. For example, it is easier to delegate tasks to an EA that understands your preferences and expectations than to assign tasks to random team members.

The right EA understands that their role includes various responsibilities, including chief of staff, business partner, scheduler, personal assistant, and project manager, all of which help you reclaim your time.

Stephanie and I discuss how principals can leverage executive assistant support to optimize these performance multipliers in our book “The 29-Hour Workday.”

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How to Delegate Tasks with an Executive Assistant 

Every principal needs an executive assistant to help them reclaim their time. The EA functions as your extension, allowing you to focus on high-level company goals. 

However, you must have a proper plan for partnering with your executive assistant:

  • Schedule Onboarding Sessions: The most effective way to onboard an executive assistant is through one-on-one training sessions, where you clearly communicate their roles and responsibilities. Part of onboarding should include introducing the EA to key stakeholders with whom they will interact, including vendors, clients, and other executive board members.
  • Outline Your Support Needs: Identify repetitive administrative tasks that your EA can handle without your input. These tasks should fall under the following performance multipliers that are outlined in the book: business partner, chief of staff, scheduler, project manager, and personal assistant.
  • Create the Executive’s Bible: This document outlines your preferences and expectations. It helps your EA learn your scheduling preferences, productivity cycles, and your expected level of support.
  • Provide System Access: Give your EA delegated access to essential systems and executive assistant tools to help them undertake the assigned tasks. This includes access to your calendar, email inbox, contact list, and client database.
  • Outline Communication Protocols: Establish how and when the executive assistant can contact you to address company-related issues. For example, your EA could use text messages for mid-priority issues and calls for urgent matters needing immediate feedback/attention.
  • Delegate Tasks Gradually: Start with basic administrative tasks, like email correspondence, then increase the EA’s responsibilities until they cover the five performance multipliers and can function as your extension.
  • Provide Rolling Reviews: Create a two-way feedback loop where you can review your executive assistant’s performance, while also asking for their perspective on improving your workflows.
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Tips to Use the Eisenhower Matrix for Strategic Decisions

The Eisenhower Matrix provides a simple yet effective tool for categorizing tasks based on urgency and importance.

It is credited to Dwight D. Eisenhower, the 34th U.S. President, who is famously quoted for his speech excerpt,

“I have two kinds of problems, the urgent and the important. The urgent are not important, and the important are never urgent.”

Renowned author Stephen Covey used those words to create the Eisenhower Matrix as we know it today. The figure below illustrates the Eisenhower Matrix:

High Urgency, High Importance

Do these tasks immediately.		High Importance, Low Urgency

Decide/plan when to do these tasks.
High Urgency, Low Importance

Delegate to someone else.		Low Urgency, Low Importance

Do the tasks later or remove them.

Here’s how you can use the Eisenhower Matrix for strategic decisions:

  • Set Your Priorities: List your executive tasks and activities, ranking them in order of importance and urgency. This should be in the context of the company vision and goals.
  • Address Quadrant I: Most tasks in this quadrant often involve crisis management, pressing business deadlines, and urgent client issues. Do these tasks immediately to stabilize operations within the company.
  • Focus on Quadrant II: These tasks often relate to your company’s long-term strategic goals, including vision setting, nurturing partnerships, talent development, innovation, and market exploration. As such, schedule regular strategy sessions and invest in relationships that will compound value over time.
  • Delegate Quadrant III: Hire an executive assistant to handle low-impact tasks, like scheduling and email management. This helps you reclaim your time, which you can allocate to Quadrant I or II.
  • Reduce or Remove Quadrant IV: Eliminate activities that have little to no impact on operational efficiency or company performance. Examples include tracking vanity metrics, committing to low-impact meetings, and micromanaging tasks.
  • Review the Matrix Regularly: Revisit your Eisenhower Matrix monthly, quarterly, and annually, and move activities across the quadrants based on changes in task importance and urgency.
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How to Avoid Burnout as a High-Level Executive

Executives must strike a balance between intense workloads and adequate recovery time to remain sharp and focused on their core business objectives. Otherwise, they risk being overwhelmed by low-importance tasks, causing them to burn out, which can undermine their productivity and overall company performance.

Here are a few tips for avoiding burnout:

  • Delegate, Delegate, Delegate: As an executive, you may often receive hundreds of emails weekly from various stakeholders. Answering all the emails could take several hours daily, which would exhaust you and take up time that would be better spent on the company’s strategy. Instead, hire an executive assistant to help get your email inbox under control and be your primary contact person. 
  • Skip Low-Importance Meetings: Ask yourself if you need to attend a meeting or event, or whether you can skip it and receive a summary later. Only commit to important meetings that impact your company’s business goals.
  • Prioritize Self-Care: Schedule regular breaks and engage in wellness activities, including exercise, a balanced diet, and adequate rest, to maintain physical and mental well-being. Additionally, you can go on vacations and family trips, allowing you to spend quality time with friends and family.
  • Understand Your Productivity Cycles: Determine your peak productivity times and reserve them for high-focus work, such as strategy meetings. This ensures that you are focused and most productive when making high-impact strategic decisions.
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Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)

This section answers commonly asked questions about executive time management:

How Can I Handle Interruptions Without Losing Productivity?

The best way to handle interruptions without losing productivity is by setting clear boundaries and communicating availability to relevant stakeholders. 

You can then partner with your executive assistant to handle interruptions by filtering calls and triaging emails so that you can focus on strategic tasks during peak performance times.

What Is the Best Way to Structure an Executive’s Day?

The best way to structure an executive’s day is by aligning your schedules with your productivity cycles. 

For example, most principals are most active during morning and mid-morning hours, during which you can prioritize high-level meetings, strategic thinking, and decision-making. You can then schedule routine tasks towards the end of the day when you are low on energy.

Can Delegation Help Improve My Time Management?

Yes. Delegation can help improve your time management. 

In fact, the primary reason for hiring an executive assistant is to delegate administrative tasks so that you can reclaim your time and focus on core business functions.

How Do I Choose the Right Productivity Tool for My Role?

The right productivity tool for your role depends on your workflow needs, such as task management, communication, or scheduling. 

Prioritize ubiquitous tools that support multi-device access anytime, anywhere. Additionally, the tool should support workflow automation, particularly for repetitive tasks such as appointment reminders.

Final Thoughts 

Time management for CEOs is about focusing on things that need your attention only during specific time scales. Only in this way can CEOs attain their highest potential and success professionally and in all other aspects of life.

Busy principals can make their schedules less hectic by partnering with an executive assistant. The EA will undertake most administrative tasks and serve as the primary point of contact, allowing you to step in only when necessary.

However, this is only possible when you find the right EA. 

Our ProAssistants have 5+ years of experience providing high-level support to CEOs, founders, and business owners with hectic schedules. Additionally, ProAssisting offers fractional executive assistants, allowing you to use ⅓, ½, or ⅔ of their services based on your support needs.

Take the first step. Schedule a call to learn how our ProAssistants can help you reclaim your time.