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The Diary Is the Strategy: What the Research Says About an Executive's Time, and What the Person Who Holds It Can Do With It.
The diary opens on Monday and the week is already gone. Forty minutes for a supplier review that three people could have settled by message, a standing one-to-one that has not changed its agenda since March, ninety minutes with the function that shouts loudest, and somewhere in the middle a thirty-minute slot called "prep" that will be eaten by the overrun before it. The one thing the executive told you in January that this year had to produce is in there too, somewhere, in a recurring slot on a Friday afternoon that has been moved four times.
Nobody in this story did anything wrong, and every one of those entries was accepted by a reasonable person for a reasonable reason. What is missing is the sentence that says what the week as a whole is supposed to buy, and the person best placed to write that sentence is usually the person who owns the diary rather than the person whose name is on it. There is a surprisingly large body of research behind that claim, and this is what it says.
What you will get out of this
What researchers found when they followed executives around with a stopwatch, and the one feature of the week that has survived fifty years of study
The study of 1,114 chief executives in six countries that found two distinct shapes of week, and which one went with better firm performance
How long a knowledge worker actually lasts on one thing before switching, measured by observation rather than by survey
What happened to meetings and to the length of the working day across three million people when the world changed overnight
The evidence on protecting a block of time, including the honest finding about what planning does and does not predict
What the research on time of day says about where to put the decision that matters, and the argument about whether decision fatigue is real
A diary audit you can run in an afternoon, with categories that mean something
The diary check: a tool that reads a week and tells you what it is currently buying
The Diary Pages: three pages for auditing a diary, rebuilding a week, and having the conversation with your executive
Where an executive's week actually goes
The first person to do this properly followed five chief executives around and wrote down what they did. The resulting description, published in 1971, is still quoted because nothing has knocked it over. Managerial work turned out to be performed at an unrelenting pace and to be characterised by variety, discontinuity and brevity. Managers came to prefer issues that were current, specific and ad hoc, and that arrived in spoken form rather than written. The ten roles the study identified are taught everywhere. The finding that matters for a diary is the plainer one underneath: the shape of the work pulls the person holding it towards whatever is nearest and loudest.
A 1985 observation study of 52 managers in a state revenue department, a manufacturing plant and a campus police department, watched over two weeks by trained observers, added something uncomfortable. When the researchers measured success by how quickly people had been promoted relative to their tenure, two activities stood out: interaction with outsiders, and socialising and politicking. Managers ranked in the top third showed more conflict management behaviour than those in the bottom third, and the most senior managers showed more decision making and planning. The activities that got people on were not the ones the job description would have predicted.
Thirty years after the original study, a Swedish researcher repeated the method with top executives and compared the two. The workload was much larger, the contact pattern leaned more towards subordinates in group settings, there was more giving of information and less administrative work. And one of the central claims of the older research did not hold: fragmentation of time was not as prevalent in the newer study. That matters, because it means the chopped-up week is a product of how the work is organised rather than a law of nature. Somebody built it, which means somebody can rebuild it.
What has changed beyond argument is the volume of small interruptions. Detailed observation of information workers in the 2000s found people averaging about three minutes on a task, and somewhat more than two minutes on any single tool or document, before switching to something else. They worked across an average of ten larger themes of work, spending about twelve minutes inside one before moving to another. A later study of 24 information workers found that 57% of those larger themes were interrupted, and that although most interrupted work was resumed the same day, more than two other activities typically happened in between. A study of constant connectivity made the useful point that these mediated interactions are so frequent and so short that counting them as individual interruptions misses what is going on: the environment itself is making simultaneous calls on attention all day.
Try this. Before you change anything, spend one week recording what the diary says and what actually happened, side by side, in two columns. The point is not to catch anybody out and the output is not a report; what you want is the gap between the planned week and the lived week, because that gap is where all the useful work is, and because it is the only evidence that will persuade anybody later.
The research behind this section
Mintzberg (1971) studied the work of five chief executives through structured observation and described managerial work as performed at an unrelenting pace and characterised by variety, discontinuity and brevity, with managers coming to prefer issues that are current, specific and ad hoc and that are presented in verbal form, and set out ten basic managerial roles in three groupings. Luthans, Rosenkrantz and Hennessey (1985) had trained participant observers record the behaviour of 52 managers in three organisations, a state department of revenue, a medium-sized manufacturing plant and a campus police department, over a two-week period, and found that two activities were significantly related to managerial success measured by a promotion index of level over tenure, namely interaction with outsiders and socialising or politicking, that managers in the top third exhibited more conflict management behaviours than those in the bottom third, and that top-level managers exhibited more decision making and planning or coordinating than middle and first-level managers. Tengblad (2006) compared a study of top executives' work with Mintzberg's and found a much larger workload, a contact pattern oriented more towards subordinates in group settings, greater emphasis on giving information and less preoccupation with administrative work, and reported that fragmentation of time, highlighted in previous studies as a central tenet of managerial work, was not as prevalent in the new study. Hales (1986) reviewed the evidence on what managers do, and Hales (1999) argued that the field had contented itself with description and correlation and attempted an explanatory account linking the common characteristics of managerial work to the ambiguous nature of managerial responsibility. González and Mark (2004) observed information workers in three roles and found that people averaged about three minutes on a task and somewhat more than two minutes using any electronic tool or paper document before switching, that they worked in an average of ten different working spheres, and that they spent about twelve minutes in a working sphere before switching to another. Mark, Gonzalez and Harris (2005) observed 24 information workers and found that 57% of their working spheres were interrupted, that collocated people worked longer before switching but had more interruptions, and that although most interrupted work was resumed on the same day, more than two intervening activities occurred before it was. Wajcman and Rose (2011) presented fine-grained data on the role of mediated communication in the fragmentation of the working day and argued that framing frequent, short mediated interactions as isolated interruptions misses an environment of simultaneous, multiple and ever-present calls on attention.
Two shapes a week can take, and what each one buys
The most useful study in this whole literature asked 1,114 chief executives in six countries to record their diaries at high frequency, then used a machine learning method to find patterns in how those weeks were shaped. Two types came out of the analysis, and the researchers called them leaders and managers. A leader-shaped week is built around multi-function, high-level meetings: several parts of the business in the room at once, senior people, the kind of conversation where a trade-off can actually be made. A manager-shaped week is built around individual meetings with core functions: one department at a time, often operational, often the same people.
Firms that hired the leader type performed better. Before anyone reorganises a diary on the strength of that sentence, the same paper supplies two pieces of restraint. It took about three years for a new chief executive to make a measurable difference, which is a long time in a world that judges a hire by Christmas. And the productivity differences appeared to come from mismatches rather than from the leader type being better for every firm. Some businesses, at some moments, need the person at the top down among the functions.
A companion study using the same diary method compared family and professional chief executives and found the family ones worked 9% fewer hours. Hours worked were positively correlated with firm performance, and the difference in hours accounted for roughly 18% of the performance gap between family and non-family firms. Time is not the only input, and it is a real one.
Two other findings belong beside this, because they answer the question of whether any of it can possibly matter that much. A study of technology services workers found that replacing a boss in the bottom tenth of quality with one in the top tenth raised a team's total output by more than adding a worker to a nine-member team would, and estimated the average boss to be about 1.75 times as productive as the average worker. And a study using chief executive hospitalisations as a natural experiment found significant effects on profitability and investment, with larger effects for younger chief executives and in human-capital-intensive industries. The telling detail is that hospitalising other senior executives did not produce the same effects. The seat is different from the other seats, which is exactly why what goes into its diary is worth arguing about.
A diary is a budget. Every hour in it was bought with an hour that could have gone somewhere else, and somebody is doing the buying whether or not anybody says so out loud.
Try this. Take last month and count two numbers: how many entries had three or more functions in the room, and how many had one. You are not looking for a target. You are looking at the current ratio, so that when you propose changing it you are proposing a change from something specific to something specific, which is a far easier conversation than proposing change in the abstract.
The research behind this section
Bandiera, Prat, Hansen and Sadun (2020) developed a survey method collecting high-frequency, high-dimensional diary data together with a machine learning algorithm estimating behavioural types, applied it to 1,114 chief executives in six countries, and found two types, "leaders" who do multifunction, high-level meetings and "managers" who do individual meetings with core functions; firms that hired leaders performed better, it took three years for a new chief executive to make a difference, and structural estimates indicated that productivity differentials were due to mismatches rather than to leaders being better for all firms. Bandiera, Lemos, Prat and Sadun (2018) used the same diary instrument to build a bottom-up measure of chief executive labour supply and found, comparing 1,114 family and professional chief executives, that family chief executives worked 9% fewer hours, that hours worked were positively correlated with firm performance, and that differences between family and non-family chief executives accounted for approximately 18% of the performance gap between family and non-family firms. Lazear, Shaw and Stanton (2015) estimated supervisor effects using company data on technology-based services workers and found that replacing a boss in the lower 10% of boss quality with one in the upper 10% increased a team's total output by more than adding one worker to a nine-member team would, that workers assigned to better bosses were less likely to leave, and that the average boss was about 1.75 times as productive as the average worker. Bennedsen, Pérez-González and Wolfenzon (2020) used variation in firms' exposure to their chief executives resulting from hospitalisation and found significant effects on profitability and investment, larger effects for younger chief executives and in growing, family-controlled and human-capital-intensive settings, and that the hospitalisation of other senior executives did not have similar effects on performance. Bertrand and Schoar (2003) constructed a manager-firm matched panel and found that manager fixed effects mattered for a wide range of corporate decisions, that management style was significantly related to manager fixed effects in performance, and that managers holding an MBA followed on average more aggressive strategies.
The diary is where the strategy is actually decided
There is a strand of strategy research that says something people in your seat have always suspected. A firm's behaviour is the result of how it channels and distributes the attention of its decision makers. What those people do depends on what issues they focus on, and what they focus on depends on how the organisation's rules, resources and relationships route issues and people into particular conversations and procedures. That is the attention-based view of the firm, set out in 1997 and developed steadily since. A diary is one of those routing mechanisms. It is arguably the most powerful one in the building, because it decides which issues get a decision maker in the room and for how long.
The empirical work backs this up in places you would not expect. A study of airline deregulation found that the environmental shift changed where top teams put their attention, that the shift was largest in firms that had changed the composition and pay of their top teams, and that attention partly explained the link between those team changes and actual changes in strategy. A study of 61 publicly traded high-technology firms found that teams which searched in places containing novel and vivid information introduced more new products, and that persistent search intensity mattered too. A study of communications firms entering the fibre-optics market found that when the chief executive's attention was pointed at the emerging technology, the firm entered faster, and that attention pointed at the existing technology went with slower progress. None of those studies measured a calendar. All of them measured where senior attention went, which is what a calendar is a record of.
A 2018 paper on what makes a strategy great put it in a sentence worth pinning up: the origins of an idea matter less than the organisation's ability to sustain focused attention while developing and implementing it. Sustained focused attention has a physical form. It looks like the same item appearing in the same diary, with the same people, for months, and surviving the weeks when something more urgent turns up.
The honest counterweight is that formal planning is not magic. Two meta-analyses have asked whether strategic planning improves organisational performance: one synthesised 26 studies and found a positive effect, concluding that methodological differences explained most of the inconsistency in earlier results, and a more recent one pooled 87 correlations from 31 studies and found a positive, moderate and significant effect, strongest where the planning was formal and the outcome was measured as effectiveness. Moderate is the word to hold onto. A well-shaped diary is one contributor among several, and claiming more than that will cost you credibility with exactly the people you need to persuade.
Try this. Write down, in one sentence and without looking anything up, what your executive's year is supposed to produce. Then open last month and mark every entry that moved that sentence forward. If you cannot write the sentence, that is the first finding of your audit, and it belongs at the top of the conversation rather than at the bottom.
The research behind this section
Ocasio (1997) set out the attention-based view of the firm, arguing that firm behaviour is the result of how firms channel and distribute the attention of their decision makers, that what decision makers do depends on which issues and answers they focus attention on, and that this in turn depends on how the firm's rules, resources and relationships distribute issues, answers and decision makers into specific communications and procedures. Ocasio (2011) distinguished three varieties of attention studied in organisation science, attentional perspective, attentional engagement and attentional selection, drawing on the neuroscience distinction between selective attention, executive attention and vigilance. Ocasio and Joseph (2018) argued that the transformation of ideas into a great strategy is shaped by sustained focused attention and a focused strategic agenda communicated throughout the organisation, illustrating the argument by comparing Apple and Motorola. Ocasio and Joseph (2005) proposed an attention-based theory of strategy formulation linking macro and micro perspectives and viewing strategy processes as networks of operational and governance channels. Joseph and Wilson (2018) examined how attention structure, meaning specialised attention within a unit and integrated attention between units, affects bottom-up and top-down processing of new issues, illustrated with Motorola during a period of sustained growth. Joseph, Laureiro-Martinez, Nigam, Ocasio and Rerup (2024) introduced a special issue on research frontiers in the attention-based view, noting a shift towards attentional engagement through interactions and social relations and an emphasis on the temporal and dynamic nature of attention. Cho and Hambrick (2006) studied airline deregulation and found that deregulation caused a shift in managerial attention, that the shift was greatest for firms that changed top management team composition and compensation in ways favouring the deregulated regime, and that attention partially mediated the relationship between top team changes and strategy changes. Li, Maggitti, Smith, Tesluk and Katila (2013) studied 61 publicly traded high-technology firms and their top executives and found that the location selection and the intensity of search independently and jointly influenced new product introductions, with teams selecting locations containing novel, vivid and salient information introducing more new products. Eggers and Kaplan (2009) studied communications technology firms entering the fibre-optics product market and found that chief executive attention towards the emerging technology and the affected industry was associated with faster entry and attention to existing technologies with slower progress. Hambrick and Mason (1984) set out the upper echelons perspective, in which organisational outcomes are partly predicted by the characteristics of the top management team. Miller and Cardinal (1994) meta-analysed 26 previously published studies and found that strategic planning positively influenced firm performance and that methods factors were primarily responsible for inconsistencies in the literature. George, Walker and Monster (2019) meta-analysed 87 correlations from 31 empirical studies and found that strategic planning had a positive, moderate and significant impact on organisational performance, strongest when performance was measured as effectiveness and when strategic planning was measured as formal strategic planning, holding across sectors and countries.
What the meetings are costing, and which ones
Meetings are the currency the diary is denominated in, so it is worth being precise about what is known. Meeting activity in organisations has continued to rise even as communication technology was expected to reduce the need for it, and researchers have argued for a proper accounting of what unnecessary or poorly run meetings cost the groups holding them. A taxonomy built from the descriptions of 491 working adults found that meetings serve several quite different purposes, which is the first useful move: a diary full of meetings is not one thing, and the audit has to separate the kinds before it can judge them.
The natural experiment of 2020 gave us numbers on a scale nobody could have collected deliberately. An event study of lockdowns across sixteen large metropolitan areas, using de-identified meeting and email metadata from 3,143,270 users, found that compared with before, the number of meetings per person rose by 12.9% and the number of attendees per meeting rose by 13.5%, while the average meeting got 20.1% shorter. The net effect was that people spent 11.5% less time in meetings per day. Meanwhile the average working day got 8.2% longer, which is 48.5 minutes. More meetings, more people in them, shorter, less total meeting time, and a longer day. That is a diary being reshaped by default rather than by design.
A separate study of 61,182 employees at one large firm over the first six months of the same year found that the shift made collaboration networks more static and more siloed, with fewer bridges between distant parts of the organisation, and moved communication away from synchronous towards asynchronous forms. The researchers noted this may make it harder for people to acquire and share new information. Which is a research finding and also a description of what happens when the only multi-function conversation in the week gets cancelled.
What makes a meeting worth its slot has been studied directly. A study of eight top management groups working through 56 agenda items, using both self-reports and observers, found that how clearly the goal of an item was defined and how focused the communication was were both positively related to effectiveness, and that focused communication partly explained the effect of the goal. The finding I would frame is about speaking up. When someone spoke up because the goal of an item was not clear, focused communication, task performance and relationship quality all went up. When someone spoke up because the discussion had gone off track, task performance and satisfaction did not improve and relationship quality went down. Asking what we are deciding is welcome. Announcing that we have drifted is not.
There is a real cost on the attendee's side too. A large telemetry study of remote meetings combined with a 715-person diary study found that meeting size, length, time of day and type all correlated with how much people multitasked during them, and that multitasking led to both positive and negative outcomes. A systematic review of videoconference fatigue sorted it into physical, emotional, cognitive and social dimensions, with causes ranging from the psychological to the technical, and a study of 849 employees at a global technology company argued that much of the fatigue came from meeting practices designed as if the social side of work did not exist.
Try this. For the next fortnight, add one line to every invitation the executive accepts: what decision this meeting is for, or what it is deciding whether to do. Anything that cannot take the line is your shortlist. You are not cancelling it yet. You are building the list you will hand over when someone asks why the week is full.
The research behind this section
Scott, Shanock and Rogelberg (2012) introduced a special issue on work meetings, noting that meeting activity in organisations has continued to rise even though advances in communication technology were once expected to diminish the need for synchronous meetings. Rogelberg, Shanock and Scott (2012) explored the costs associated with unnecessary or poorly facilitated meetings and proposed a three-stage model for improving the return on time invested in meetings. Allen, Beck, Scott and Rogelberg (2014) used discourse analysis of open-ended survey responses from 491 working adults to develop a taxonomy of meeting purpose and investigated how often working adults engaged in meetings of each purpose. DeFilippis, Impink, Singell, Polzer and Sadun (2022) conducted an event study of lockdowns in sixteen large metropolitan areas using de-identified, aggregated meeting and email metadata from 3,143,270 users and found increases in the number of meetings per person of 12.9% and in the number of attendees per meeting of 13.5%, a decrease in average meeting length of 20.1%, a net decrease of 11.5% in time spent in meetings per day, and a durable increase in the length of the average working day of 8.2%, or 48.5 minutes. Yang, Holtz, Jaffe and colleagues (2021) used data on the emails, calendars, instant messages, calls and workweek hours of 61,182 United States employees of one firm over six months and estimated that firm-wide remote work caused collaboration networks to become more static and siloed with fewer bridges between disparate parts, with a decrease in synchronous and an increase in asynchronous communication. Bang, Fuglesang, Ovesen and Eilertsen (2010) analysed self-report and observer data from eight top management groups processing 56 agenda items and found that goal definition and focused communication were positively related to team effectiveness, that the effect of goal definition was partially mediated by focused communication, that speaking up when a goal was unclear increased focused communication, task performance and relationship quality, and that speaking up when the discussion was off track was not related to task performance or member satisfaction and was negatively related to relationship quality. Cao, Lee, Iqbal and colleagues (2021) analysed a large telemetry dataset of remote meeting behaviour collected from February to May 2020 alongside a 715-person diary study and found that meeting size, length, time and type significantly correlated with the extent of multitasking, and that multitasking led to both positive and negative outcomes. Li and Yee (2023) systematically reviewed research on videoconference fatigue following PRISMA guidelines, screening 34,574 results down to 14 eligible articles, and classified the phenomenon into physical, emotional, cognitive and social dimensions with psychological, social, technical, chronemic and productivity antecedents. Bergmann, Rintel, Baym and colleagues (2023) studied 849 employees' experiences of all-remote video meetings at one global technology company and argued that videoconferencing fatigue arose partly because work practices and technologies were designed on assumptions about the balance between the task and social dimensions of work relationships. Vafeas (1999) examined the relationship between board meeting frequency and firm performance.
Why a tidy diary can still be a broken one
Here is the trap that catches good assistants, and it caught me for years. A diary can be beautifully organised, colour-coded, conflict-free, every travel buffer in place, and still be doing the wrong thing, because tidiness is a property of the diary and usefulness is a property of the week the diary produces.
The clearest evidence sits in the research on interruption. A five-day diary study of 133 nurses, sampled four times a day, found that interruptions to workflow were associated with lower satisfaction with one's own performance, more forgetting of intentions and more irritation, with mental demands and time pressure explaining much of the effect on irritation. A three-week experience sampling study of 111 people found something more balanced: being intruded upon depleted people's self-regulatory resources, which hurt job satisfaction, and at the same time met their need to belong, which helped it, with the belonging partly buffering the depletion. Interruptions are social as well as costly, and a week with none at all would be a different problem.
The laboratory work on task switching adds the mechanism. Moving between two tasks carries a measurable cost in time and accuracy even when the tasks are simple and the switch is predictable, and a review of interruptions and task transitions in organisations has pulled together how those costs accumulate across a working day. A conceptual framework published in 2003 made the point that not all interruptions are the same kind of event, which is why "reduce interruptions" is unhelpful advice and "know which kind you are dealing with" is not.
And then there is the belief that some people are simply built for this. The research term is polychronicity, the extent to which someone prefers to do several things at once and believes that is the right way to work. It has been measured carefully since 1999 across eleven samples and more than 2,000 people. A critical review a decade later found the concept defined and measured in a wide range of incompatible ways and the results on performance incongruent. So if your executive tells you they work better in chaos, the research neither confirms nor refutes it. What it can say is that their preference for a fragmented week is a preference, and preferences are negotiable in a way that laws of nature are not.
Tidying a diary makes it easier to read. Rebuilding one changes what the organisation gets.
Try this. Pick the one piece of work in the next month that most needs unbroken thought, and find out how it is currently getting done. If the answer is early mornings, late evenings or a flight, you have found a piece of work the week is not paying for, and that is a much stronger case than any argument about efficiency.
The research behind this section
Baethge and Rigotti (2013) ran a five-day diary study with 133 nurses in German hospitals, sampled four times daily, and found that workflow interruptions had detrimental effects on satisfaction with one's own performance, on the forgetting of intentions and on irritation, with mental demands and time pressure mediating the effect on irritation and partially mediating the effect on satisfaction with performance. Puranik, Koopman and Vough (2021) ran a three-week experience sampling study with 111 participants and found that work intrusions depleted self-regulatory resources, which reduced job satisfaction, while interaction with the interrupter fulfilled the need for belongingness, which raised it, with belongingness buffering the negative effect of depletion. Leroy, Schmidt and Madjar (2020) reviewed the characteristics and processes of interruptions and task transitions across otherwise disconnected research domains. Jett and George (2003) set out a conceptual framework for the role of interruptions in organisational life. Rubinstein, Meyer and Evans (2001) examined executive control of cognitive processes in task switching, and Monsell (2003) reviewed the task switching literature. Bluedorn, Kalliath, Strube and Martin (1999) developed the ten-item Inventory of Polychronic Values using data from eleven samples totalling 2,190 people, defining polychronicity as the extent to which people prefer to be engaged in two or more tasks simultaneously and believe their preference is the best way to do things. König and Waller (2010) reviewed the polychronicity literature and found a wide range of conceptualisations and operationalisations of the construct and incongruent results concerning its effects on behaviour and performance.
Protecting a block, and making the protection hold
Every assistant who has tried to defend two hours on a Thursday morning knows the standard outcome. The two hours hold for a fortnight, then something urgent lands on them and they never come back. It is worth knowing what the evidence says, because it is more encouraging in one direction and more sobering in another than the internet would have you believe.
Start with the encouraging half. A meta-analysis of the time management literature found that time management is moderately related to job performance, academic achievement and wellbeing, and moderately and negatively related to distress. The relationship with job performance appears to have strengthened over the decades, and the effect on wellbeing, particularly life satisfaction, was larger than the effect on performance. That last point is worth sitting with, because most of us sell diary work on productivity when the better-supported claim is that it makes the week more liveable.
Now for the sobering half of it. An earlier review of 32 empirical studies found that time management behaviours related positively to perceived control of time, job satisfaction and health and negatively to stress, and that the relationship with actual performance was unclear, with training improving skills without that improvement automatically transferring to results. And a daily diary study that followed 29 engineers across 878 individual tasks found that whether a planned task got completed was related to its priority, its urgency and its lower importance, along with conscientiousness and emotional stability at the individual level. Completion was not related to workload, job autonomy, planning, or perceived control of time. Read that twice if you have ever built a beautiful plan and watched it lose to the merely urgent. The plan is not what decides; the ranking is.
Which is why the format of the protection matters more than its existence. The research on implementation intentions, running since 1999, shows that plans of the form "when situation X happens, I will do Y" hand control of the response over to the situation, and reliably improve follow-through compared with a general intention. A set of studies on unfinished goals found that they intrude on unrelated tasks until a specific plan is made, at which point the intrusions stop. Unpacking a task into its parts has been shown to reduce the planning fallacy, which is the tendency to believe things will take less time than they do. Applied to a diary, that means a block labelled "strategy" will lose, and a block labelled "decide the two things we are stopping in Q3, with the two one-page options already in the folder" has a fighting chance. Researchers have also field-tested the quiet hour as a time management technique, which is the closest thing the literature has to a trial of the thing you are trying to do.
There is a counterweight that surprised me. Across thirteen studies, scheduling an activity made it feel less free-flowing and more like work, and reduced both the anticipation and the enjoyment of it. The researchers found that roughly scheduling, meaning putting it in the day without a fixed start time, removed the effect entirely. That work was done on leisure, and it has an obvious application to the parts of an executive's week that need to feel open: thinking time, the walk-around, the conversation with no agenda. Some things belong in the diary as a firm block. Others belong as a rough one, and the difference is not laziness.
Try this. Rewrite one protected block in your executive's diary so that its title names the output rather than the topic, and put the inputs it needs in the invitation. Then move it to the hour of the week that is least likely to be raided, which for most organisations is earlier in the week and earlier in the day than the one it is sitting in.
The research behind this section
Aeon, Faber and Panaccio (2021) meta-analysed the impact of time management on performance and wellbeing and found time management moderately related to job performance, academic achievement and wellbeing and moderately and negatively related to distress, with individual differences and contextual factors showing weaker associations apart from conscientiousness, with the link to job performance appearing to increase over the decades, and with time management enhancing wellbeing, in particular life satisfaction, to a greater extent than performance. Claessens, van Eerde, Rutte and Roe (2007) reviewed 32 empirical studies of time management conducted between 1982 and 2004 and found that time management behaviours related positively to perceived control of time, job satisfaction and health and negatively to stress, that the relationship with work and academic performance was not clear, and that training seemed to enhance time management skills without automatically transferring to better performance. Claessens, Van Eerde, Rutte and Roe (2004) tested two mediation models and found that perceived control of time partially mediated the relationship between planning behaviour and strain, job satisfaction and job performance, with workload and job autonomy adding explanatory power. Claessens, Van Eerde, Rutte and Roe (2010) studied 878 tasks identified by 29 research and development engineers with a daily diary and found that priority, urgency and lower importance were related to task completion at the task level and conscientiousness, emotional stability and time management training at the individual level, while task completion was not related to task attractiveness, workload, job autonomy, planning or perceived control of time. Macan (1994) tested a process model of time management in which perceived control of time mediates the effects of time management behaviours. Gollwitzer (1999) set out implementation intentions, plans of the form "whenever situation x arises, I will initiate the goal-directed response y", which delegate control of goal-directed responses to anticipated situational cues, and reviewed a programme of research showing that they further goal attainment. Masicampo and Baumeister (2011) found across several studies that unfulfilled goals caused intrusive thoughts during unrelated reading, high accessibility of goal-related words and poorer performance on unrelated anagrams, and that allowing participants to formulate specific plans eliminated these activation and interference effects, with the reduction mediated by the earnestness of the plans. Kruger and Evans (2004) found that unpacking a task into its components reduced the planning fallacy. König, Kleinmann and Höhmann (2013) reported a field test of the quiet hour as a time management technique. Tonietto and Malkoc (2016) found across thirteen studies that scheduling a leisure activity rather than experiencing it impromptu made it feel less free-flowing and more work-like and diminished both anticipated excitement and experienced enjoyment, and that roughly scheduling without prespecified times eliminated the effect. Malkoc and Tonietto (2019) reviewed time management strategies and distinguished activity maximisation from outcome maximisation, noting that a strategy maximising the number of activities may be detrimental to outcomes. Perlow, Okhuysen and Repenning (2002) explored how an emphasis on speed affects organisational decision-making processes. Perlow (2001) compared groups of software engineers in the United States, India, China and Hungary and found that seventy- and eighty-hour weeks were not inherent in the work, that work-time standards and norms varied across sites, and that the way work was coordinated perpetuated those norms.
The shape of the day, and where the good decisions live
If the diary decides which issues reach the decision maker, the shape of the day decides what state the decision maker is in when they arrive. There is more evidence here than most people realise, and one genuine argument running through the middle of it.
The cleanest study used test data for every child in Danish public schools across four school years and found that for every hour later in the day a test was taken, scores fell by 0.9% of a standard deviation. A twenty- to thirty-minute break improved average scores. Children are not executives, and the effect is small, and it is measured across hundreds of thousands of observations in a real setting with nothing riding on the researchers' hypothesis, which is more than can be said for most findings about productivity. A study of antibiotic prescribing examined the same question across a clinic session, framing it in terms of the cumulative cognitive demand of repeated decisions.
Then there is the famous one. A study of Israeli parole boards found that the proportion of favourable rulings fell from about 65% to nearly zero across each session of the day and returned to about 65% after a food break. It is one of the most cited findings in behavioural science, and it has been argued with ever since. A response in the same journal pointed to factors the original analysis had overlooked, and a 2016 simulation showed that an effect of the same size could be produced by a statistical artefact: favourable rulings take longer, so a judge who plans even minimally will start a short case rather than a long one before a break. A scoping review of decision fatigue in hospital settings screened nearly 13,000 citations and found only sixteen studies meeting its criteria, half of them conference abstracts. So the honest position is that the direction of the effect is plausible and widely observed, the size of it is contested, and the mechanism is not settled.
Where the evidence is steadier is on timing and the person. Reviews of circadian rhythms in cognition find that time of day affects attention, executive functioning and memory, and that the effect depends on chronotype and on whether the task falls at that person's peak. An experimental study found that morning types generally outperformed evening types and coped better at their non-optimal times. Meanwhile the large study of remote meetings suggested avoiding important meetings in the morning, on the evidence of when people multitasked least. Those two findings are in tension, and the way through it is a question you ask your executive once and then design the week around.
Length has its own evidence. A study of munition workers found output proportional to hours below a threshold and rising at a decreasing rate above it. A study of call centre agents found that as hours worked increased, the average handling time for a call increased, meaning productivity fell within the day. And a study of organisational slack found an inverse U: too little and too much were both bad for innovation, which is as good a description of a diary as you will find in an economics journal.
Try this. Ask your executive one question and write the answer where you will see it: "which two hours of the week do you think most clearly?" Then treat those two hours as the scarcest resource in the organisation, because on the evidence they are, and stop giving them to anything that could be done at four o'clock on a Wednesday.
The research behind this section
Sievertsen, Gino and Piovesan (2016) used test data for all children attending Danish public schools between the 2009/10 and 2012/13 school years and found that for every hour later in the day, test scores decreased by 0.9% of a standard deviation, and that a twenty- to thirty-minute break improved average test scores. Linder, Doctor, Friedberg and colleagues (2014) examined time of day and the decision to prescribe antibiotics, framing the question in terms of the cumulative cognitive demand of repeated decisions. Danziger, Levav and Avnaim-Pesso (2011) analysed sequential parole decisions by experienced judges and found that the percentage of favourable rulings dropped gradually from about 65% to nearly zero within each decision session and returned abruptly to about 65% after a break. Weinshall-Margel and Shapard (2011) responded that factors overlooked in the analysis of those parole decisions could account for the pattern. Glöckner (2016) ran simulations showing that the observed influence of order could alternatively be explained as a statistical artefact resulting from favourable rulings taking longer than unfavourable ones, such that a hypothetical rational judge planning ahead minimally would produce an effect of similar magnitude. Perry, Jones, Stumpff and colleagues (2025) conducted a scoping review of decision fatigue in inpatient settings, retrieving 12,781 citations, retaining 41 after screening and finding 16 studies meeting the inclusion criteria, half of which were conference abstracts, with emergency medicine and intensive care the most frequently studied settings. Schmidt, Collette, Cajochen and Peigneux (2007) reviewed the effects of sleep pressure, circadian variation and chronotype on cognition and concluded that time-of-day modulations affect attentional capacities, executive functioning and memory, contingent on chronotype and on the synchrony between a person's peak circadian arousal and the time of testing. Nowack and Van der Meer (2018) studied 36 participants aged 18 to 40 on a semantic analogy task and replicated the synchrony effect, finding that morning types generally outperformed evening types and coped better than evening types at suboptimal times of day. Pencavel (2015) analysed observations on munition workers and found a nonlinear relationship in which output was proportional to hours below a threshold and rose at a decreasing rate above it. Collewet and Sauermann (2017) used daily information on the working hours and performance of call centre agents and found that as the number of hours worked increased, the average handling time for a call increased, meaning agents became less productive. Nohria and Gulati (1996) found an inverse U-shaped relationship between organisational slack and innovation, with both too much and too little slack detrimental, and Nohria and Gulati (1997) considered what the optimum amount of organisational slack might be. Bloom, Liang, Roberts and Ying (2015) randomly assigned call centre employees who had volunteered to work from home either to home or to the office for nine months and found a 13% performance increase, 9% of it from working more minutes per shift through fewer breaks and sick days and 4% from more calls per minute, with attrition halving and the promotion rate conditional on performance falling.
The diary audit, and categories that mean something
Here is the framework, and it takes an afternoon for the first pass and about an hour a month afterwards, and it produces something you can put in front of an executive without either of you feeling got at.
Pull four weeks, not one. A single week is an anecdote and will be argued with. Four weeks contains the monthly rhythm, at least one crisis and at least one cancellation pattern, and it is short enough to still feel current.
Sort every entry into six categories, and no more. The categories have to answer a question the executive cares about, which is why "internal" and "external" are useless and these are not. *Decides something*, where a choice gets made that could not be made without this person in the room. *Moves the year*, where the work is the thing the year is supposed to produce, even if nothing is decided today. *Keeps a relationship alive*, which includes the board member, the big customer and the person who will be needed in six months. *Feeds someone information* they could have received another way. *Because it has always been there*, the recurring entry nobody has questioned since it was set up. *Was not chosen*, meaning it arrived, it was accepted, and no one asked whether it should have been.
Count hours, not entries. A twelve-minute stand-up and a four-hour offsite are one entry each and tell you nothing side by side. Percentages of the total working week are what land in the room.
Then add three counts that are worth more than the categories. How many entries had three or more functions represented, because that is the leader-shaped part of the week. The length of the longest unbroken block that was not a meeting, in each of the four weeks. And the number of times the protected block was moved or lost, because that number is the argument.
Look at what the diary is telling everyone else. Research on shared calendars found that electronic calendars make time allocation publicly visible in a way paper never did, creating both an opportunity for others to infer useful things about a schedule and an occasion for peer judgement about how that time is being spent. A diary is a broadcast. If yours shows six hours with one function and none with another, the second function has already drawn its conclusion.
Try this. Do the four weeks and the six categories, and write one number at the top of the page: the percentage of hours in the "moves the year" category. Do not interpret it yet. Take it to the conversation and let the executive be the first person to say whether it is the right number.
The research behind this section
Palen (1999) studied groupware calendar systems and found that electronic calendars can easily share contextualised information publicly over a network, creating opportunities for peer judgement about time allocation and raising privacy concerns while also supporting coordination by allowing others to make useful inferences about a schedule, and argued that such systems affect temporal coordination well beyond meeting scheduling. Blandford and Green (2001) compared group and individual time management tools and argued that what users get from them is not what they need. Cranshaw, Elwany, Newman and colleagues (2017) built and deployed a scheduling system that broke common scheduling scenarios into structured workflows completed as a series of microtasks, automated where possible and executed by a person otherwise, and reported lessons from scheduling thousands of meetings over a year of real-world deployments. Orlikowski and Yates (2002) proposed temporal structuring as a way of understanding time as an enacted phenomenon, in which actors produce and reproduce temporal structures through everyday action, which in turn shape the rhythm and form of their practices. Bergeron, Shipp, Rosen and Furst (2013) analysed archival data from 3,680 employees in a professional services firm and found that time spent on task performance was more important than time spent on organisational citizenship behaviour in determining performance evaluation, salary increase, advancement speed and promotion, and that, controlling for task time, employees who spent more time on citizenship behaviour had lower salary increases and advanced more slowly. Nijp, Beckers, Geurts, Tucker and Kompier (2012) systematically reviewed 63 papers from 53 studies published between 1995 and 2011 and found moderately strong cross-sectional evidence for positive associations between global worktime control and both work-non-work balance and job-related outcomes, with no consistent evidence regarding health and wellbeing. Kelly, Moen, Oakes and colleagues (2014) ran a group-randomised trial in an information technology workplace in which some units took part in an initiative training supervisors to support employees' personal lives and prompting employees to reconsider when and where they work, and found statistically significant though modest improvements in work-family conflict and family time adequacy, larger changes in schedule control and supervisor support, and no evidence that the intervention increased work hours or perceived job demands.
The conversation about what the diary is for
The audit is the easy half. The conversation is where it either becomes a change or becomes a document nobody opens again, and there is research on that too, from a literature on how people below the top get issues taken seriously at the top.
That work, which runs from 1993 onwards, treats raising an issue with senior people as a skill with moves rather than as a matter of courage. The moves that matter are about framing, timing, who else is in the room and how the issue is bundled with things the organisation already cares about. A later study found that the strongest contextual signal affecting whether people were willing to raise an issue at all was how exclusive the organisation's culture felt. Which tells you that if your executive has never invited a conversation about their own time, it is not necessarily because they would refuse one.
Four things make this conversation go well, and I have learned three of them the hard way.
Open with their sentence, not your findings. Ask what this year has to produce. Write it down in their words. Everything you say afterwards is measured against that sentence rather than against your opinion, which changes who the proposal belongs to.
Bring the ratio, then be quiet. The percentage of hours in each category, the number of multi-function entries, the number of times the protected block was lost. The research on top team meetings found that asking what an item is for improves both the work and the relationship, while pointing out that things have gone off track does not, and the same holds in this conversation. Put the numbers on the table as a question about what the week is for.
Propose the smallest structural change that is still a change. One recurring entry retired, one block moved to a better hour, one meeting given a decision in its title. Temporal structures in organisations are made and remade by ordinary repeated action, which is why the small durable change beats the grand redesign that lasts a fortnight.
Agree the rule for what happens when something urgent lands on the block. Not whether it can be moved, because it can and sometimes it must. What replaces it, by when, and who says so. The team research on temporal leadership found that leaders who actively shape and coordinate how a team handles time have a direct positive effect on performance, and that they make temporal differences between people easier to manage. In most organisations that temporal leadership is exercised by whoever holds the diary, whether or not anybody has called it leadership.
The question is never whether the week is full. It is whether the full week is pointed at the thing the year is supposed to produce.
Try this. Ask for fifteen minutes, take one page, and end with a single sentence you both agree to: "this quarter, the diary is for X." Then put a monthly fifteen-minute review in both diaries to check the week against it. A rule that gets revisited survives; a rule that gets set once does not.
The research behind this section
Dutton and Ashford (1993) set out issue selling to top management as a form of upward influence through which lower-level managers direct the attention of senior people towards particular issues. Dutton, Ashford, O'Neill and Lawrence (2001) examined the moves that matter in issue selling and their relationship to organisational change. Dutton, Ashford, Lawrence and Miner-Rubino (2002) analysed the contextual cues managers attend to when considering raising an issue and found across a qualitative study and an experiment that the exclusiveness of the organisational culture was the most potent cue affecting willingness to sell an issue. Bang, Fuglesang, Ovesen and Eilertsen (2010) found in eight top management groups processing 56 agenda items that speaking up when a goal was unclear increased focused communication, task performance and relationship quality, while speaking up when the discussion was off track was negatively related to relationship quality. Orlikowski and Yates (2002) argued that temporal structures are produced and reproduced through everyday action and in turn shape the temporal rhythm and form of ongoing practices. Mohammed and Nadkarni (2011) studied 71 teams in a business process outsourcing firm in India and found that team temporal leadership moderated the relationships between time urgency diversity and team performance and between pacing style diversity and team performance, and that temporal leadership had a direct positive influence on team performance. Mohammed and Nadkarni (2014) found in 71 teams that shared temporal cognition attenuated and temporal transactive memory systems amplified the negative effects of polychronicity diversity on team performance, and that shared temporal cognition exerted a strong positive effect on performance. Gersick (1988) studied the complete life spans of eight naturally occurring teams and found that they progressed in a pattern of punctuated equilibrium through alternating inertia and revolution, with progress triggered more by members' awareness of time and deadlines than by the completion of an absolute amount of work. Gevers, Rutte and Van Eerde (2006) studied 31 groups longitudinally and found that similarity in group members' pacing and the exchange of temporal reminders both affected shared temporal cognitions at different stages, and that shared temporal cognitions could either facilitate or counteract meeting a deadline depending on members' pacing. Akinola, Martin and Phillips (2018) examined gender differences in the affective associations attached to delegating work. Leana (1986) studied 44 supervisors and 198 claims adjusters across 19 branch offices of a large insurance company and examined the predictors and consequences of delegation.
The diary check
All of this comes down to one moment in practice: a diary in front of you, a quarter ahead, and a decision about what to propose changing first. So here is a tool for that moment.
Put in whose diary it is, what the year is supposed to produce, and nine things about how the week is currently shaped. It gives you a reading of what the diary is buying at the moment, the three places the evidence says to look first, an order of moves, what to check a month later, and a note you can copy into the conversation.
Where to start
If you take one thing from all of this, make it the sentence. Before any audit, any category, any protected block, get your executive to say in their own words what this year is supposed to produce, and write it down where both of you can see it. Every argument about the diary afterwards becomes a question of evidence rather than a question of taste, and that is the difference between a proposal that gets adopted and a proposal that gets thanked.
After that, there are three moves worth making.
Count four weeks into the six categories and take the ratio to the conversation without interpreting it. Retire one recurring entry that nobody has questioned since it was set up, and notice that the sky stays where it is. And rename one protected block so that its title names the output and its invitation carries the inputs, then guard it with an agreed rule about what happens when something urgent lands on top of it.
I have put the three pages I would use into a download: a diary audit sheet with the six categories and the three counts, a week-shape page for rebuilding, and a one-page script for the conversation with your executive.
There is a version of this role where the diary is a service, and it is a good service, delivered with care by people who are very good at it. There is another version where the diary is an instrument, and the person holding it is making choices all week about what the most expensive attention in the building gets pointed at. The research says the second version is describing something real, that the shape of an executive's week is associated with how the firm performs, and that the shape is built out of hundreds of small decisions that mostly pass through one person. That person is you, and it is worth knowing what you are holding.
The part of this that shows up in how you are seen at work sits inside what the Connected Leader Assessment calls Strategic Contribution: whether your work is connected to what the organisation is trying to achieve, whether you can explain the link out loud, and whether the choices you make on someone else's behalf are made against the strategy rather than against the queue. It is the dimension that decides whether the diary you hold reads as administration or as judgement.
The assessment is free, takes about twelve minutes and gives you a read across all five dimensions. If you want to go further on this one, the Skill Sprints are short, focused programmes on a single dimension, and the Irreplaceable Audit is the place to look at how much of your week is spent making calls nobody else in the organisation is positioned to make, which is usually more of it than the job title suggests.
Stay savvy.
Meg ✌️
Free tools
The diary check, the interactive tool in this post, free
The Diary Pages, the download in this post, free
The Connected Leader Assessment, twelve minutes, free, with a read on Strategic Contribution, the dimension this post sits in
The Irreplaceable Audit, forty-eight activities across four kinds of work, free, for seeing how much of your week is judgement rather than administration
P.S. Want to Go Deeper on the Executive Diary?
If this resonated and you want to go further, here is the evidence the piece is built on. These are the papers that shaped my thinking on where executive time actually goes, what attention does for a strategy, what meetings and fragmentation cost, and what it takes to protect a block of time, and they are well worth your time.
Every DOI below has been checked. Where I could not confirm a figure from the paper itself, I have left the figure out rather than guess.
📃 Mintzberg (1971) Five chief executives, watched. An unrelenting pace, and work characterised by variety, discontinuity and brevity. https://doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.18.2.b97
📃 Luthans, Rosenkrantz and Hennessey (1985) 52 managers observed over two weeks. What went with promotion was time with outsiders and time spent socialising. https://doi.org/10.1177/002188638502100303
📃 Tengblad (2006) Mintzberg's method repeated thirty years on. A bigger workload, more group settings, and less fragmentation than before. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-6486.2006.00651.x
📃 Hales (1986) A critical review of the evidence on what managers actually do. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-6486.1986.tb00936.x
📃 Hales (1999) Why managers do what they do: an explanation built on the ambiguity of managerial responsibility. https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-8551.00143
📃 Bandiera and colleagues (2020) 1,114 chief executives in six countries. Two shapes of week, leader and manager, and better performance for the firms that hired leaders. https://doi.org/10.1086/705331
📃 Bandiera and colleagues (2018) The same diary method applied to family firms. Family chief executives worked 9% fewer hours, and hours went with performance. https://doi.org/10.1093/rfs/hhx138
📃 Lazear, Shaw and Stanton (2015) Swapping a bottom-tenth boss for a top-tenth one raised team output by more than adding a tenth worker. https://doi.org/10.1086/681097
📃 Bertrand and Schoar (2003) Individual managers leave fingerprints on investment, financial and organisational decisions. https://doi.org/10.1162/003355303322552775
📃 Bennedsen, Pérez-González and Wolfenzon (2020) Chief executive hospitalisations moved profitability and investment. Hospitalising other senior executives did not. https://doi.org/10.1111/jofi.12897
📃 Wajcman and Rose (2011) The working day is fragmented by an environment of constant, simultaneous calls on attention, not by isolated interruptions. https://doi.org/10.1177/0170840611410829
📃 Mark, Gonzalez and Harris (2005) 24 information workers. 57% of their larger themes of work were interrupted, with more than two other activities before resumption. https://doi.org/10.1145/1054972.1055017
📃 González and Mark (2004) About three minutes on a task, about twelve in a larger theme of work, and ten themes running at once. https://doi.org/10.1145/985692.985707
📃 Bloom and colleagues (2015) Nine months of randomised home working raised performance 13%, mostly through more minutes actually worked per shift. https://doi.org/10.1093/qje/qju032
📃 Ocasio (1997) Firm behaviour as the result of how the firm channels and distributes the attention of its decision makers. https://doi.org/10.1002/(sici)1097-0266(199707)18:1+<187::aid-smj936>3.0.co;2-k
📃 Ocasio (2011) Three varieties of attention in organisations, and why they are not the same thing. https://doi.org/10.1287/orsc.1100.0602
📃 Cho and Hambrick (2006) Airline deregulation moved top team attention, and attention partly explained why strategy changed. https://doi.org/10.1287/orsc.1060.0192
📃 Joseph and Wilson (2018) How the structure of attention inside a firm shapes which new issues get picked up as it grows. https://doi.org/10.1002/smj.2715
📃 Li and colleagues (2013) 61 high-technology firms. Teams that searched in novel, vivid places introduced more new products. https://doi.org/10.5465/amj.2010.0844
📃 Hambrick and Mason (1984) The upper echelons view: what an organisation does reflects the people at the top of it. https://doi.org/10.2307/258434
📃 Eggers and Kaplan (2009) Chief executive attention pointed at the emerging technology went with faster entry; attention to the old one went with slower. https://doi.org/10.1287/orsc.1080.0401
📃 Vafeas (1999) The relationship between how often a board meets and how the firm performs. https://doi.org/10.1016/s0304-405x(99)00018-5
📃 Ocasio and Joseph (2018) Great strategy comes less from the idea than from sustaining focused attention on it, compared across Apple and Motorola. https://doi.org/10.1287/stsc.2017.0042
📃 Ocasio and Joseph (2005) An attention-based theory of how strategy actually gets formulated, from the top down and the bottom up. https://doi.org/10.1016/s0742-3322(05)22002-8
📃 Joseph and colleagues (2024) Where attention research is heading: engagement through interaction, and attention as a temporal, dynamic thing. https://doi.org/10.1177/14761270231223397
📃 George, Walker and Monster (2019) Meta-analysis of 87 correlations from 31 studies. Strategic planning had a positive, moderate effect on performance. https://doi.org/10.1111/puar.13104
📃 Miller and Cardinal (1994) Meta-analysis of 26 studies. Planning helped, and methodological differences explained most of the earlier disagreement. https://doi.org/10.2307/256804
📃 Rogelberg, Shanock and Scott (2012) What unnecessary and badly run meetings cost, and a three-stage way of getting a return on the time. https://doi.org/10.1177/1046496411429170
📃 Scott, Shanock and Rogelberg (2012) Meeting activity kept rising even as the technology that was supposed to replace it arrived. https://doi.org/10.1177/1046496411429023
📃 Allen and colleagues (2014) 491 working adults describing their meetings. A taxonomy of what meetings are actually for. https://doi.org/10.1108/mrr-03-2013-0067
📃 Bang and colleagues (2010) Eight top management groups, 56 agenda items. Saying you do not know what an item is for helped; saying the talk had drifted did not. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9450.2009.00769.x
📃 Cao and colleagues (2021) Telemetry plus a 715-person diary study. Meeting size, length, timing and type all shaped how much people multitasked. https://doi.org/10.1145/3411764.3445243
📃 Yang and colleagues (2021) 61,182 employees over six months. Networks became more static and siloed, and communication less synchronous. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41562-021-01196-4
📃 DeFilippis and colleagues (2022) 3.1 million users in sixteen cities. More meetings, more people, shorter, less total meeting time, and a working day 48 minutes longer. https://doi.org/10.1057/s41599-022-01190-9
📃 Bergmann and colleagues (2023) 849 employees. Videoconference fatigue traced to practices designed as if the social half of work did not exist. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10606-022-09451-6
📃 Li and Yee (2023) Systematic review of videoconference fatigue: physical, emotional, cognitive and social, with five families of cause. https://doi.org/10.1108/intr-07-2021-0499
📃 Leroy, Schmidt and Madjar (2020) Interruptions and task transitions pulled together from research areas that rarely talk to each other. https://doi.org/10.5465/annals.2017.0146
📃 Jett and George (2003) A framework for the different kinds of interruption in organisational life, and why they are not one thing. https://doi.org/10.2307/30040736
📃 Puranik, Koopman and Vough (2021) 111 people over three weeks. Being interrupted drained self-control and met the need to belong at the same time. https://doi.org/10.1037/apl0000875
📃 Baethge and Rigotti (2013) 133 nurses, five days, four readings a day. Interruptions lowered satisfaction with one's own work and raised irritation. https://doi.org/10.1080/02678373.2013.761783
📃 Rubinstein, Meyer and Evans (2001) The executive control involved in switching between tasks, measured in the laboratory. https://doi.org/10.1037/0096-1523.27.4.763
📃 Monsell (2003) A review of task switching and the costs that come with it. https://doi.org/10.1016/s1364-6613(03)00028-7
📃 König and Waller (2010) Polychronicity reviewed: defined and measured in incompatible ways, with results on performance still incongruent. https://doi.org/10.1080/08959281003621703
📃 Bluedorn and colleagues (1999) The ten-item measure of polychronicity, built across eleven samples and 2,190 people. https://doi.org/10.1108/02683949910263747
📃 Aeon, Faber and Panaccio (2021) Meta-analysis. Time management is moderately related to performance and more strongly to wellbeing than most people assume. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0245066
📃 Claessens and colleagues (2007) 32 studies. Time management relates to control of time, satisfaction and health; the link to performance is unclear. https://doi.org/10.1108/00483480710726136
📃 Claessens and colleagues (2004) Perceived control of time partly explains how planning behaviour turns into strain, satisfaction and performance. https://doi.org/10.1002/job.292
📃 Claessens and colleagues (2010) 878 tasks, 29 engineers. Completion tracked priority and urgency, and not planning or perceived control of time. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1464-0597.2009.00390.x
📃 Macan (1994) The process model of time management, with perceived control of time in the middle of it. https://doi.org/10.1037/0021-9010.79.3.381
📃 König, Kleinmann and Höhmann (2013) A field test of the quiet hour as a time management technique. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.erap.2012.12.003
📃 Gollwitzer (1999) Plans of the form 'when X happens, I will do Y' hand the trigger to the situation and improve follow-through. https://doi.org/10.1037/0003-066x.54.7.493
📃 Masicampo and Baumeister (2011) Unfinished goals intrude on unrelated work until a specific plan is made, at which point the intrusions stop. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0024192
📃 Kruger and Evans (2004) Unpacking a task into its parts reduced the planning fallacy. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jesp.2003.11.001
📃 Tonietto and Malkoc (2016) Thirteen studies. Scheduling made an activity feel like work; scheduling it roughly, without a fixed time, did not. https://doi.org/10.1509/jmr.14.0591
📃 Malkoc and Tonietto (2019) Maximising the number of activities and maximising the outcome are different goals, and they pull against each other. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.copsyc.2018.04.017
📃 Perlow, Okhuysen and Repenning (2002) What an emphasis on speed does to the way organisations make decisions. https://doi.org/10.2307/3069323
📃 Perlow (2001) Engineers in four countries. Seventy-hour weeks turned out to be a local norm rather than a feature of the work. https://doi.org/10.1177/0730888401028001006
📃 Sievertsen, Gino and Piovesan (2016) Every hour later in the day cost 0.9% of a standard deviation in test scores, and a short break gave some of it back. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1516947113
📃 Linder and colleagues (2014) Time of day and the decision to prescribe antibiotics, framed as the cumulative cost of repeated decisions. https://doi.org/10.1001/jamainternmed.2014.5225
📃 Danziger, Levav and Avnaim-Pesso (2011) Favourable parole rulings fell from about 65% to near zero across a session and returned to 65% after a break. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1018033108
📃 Weinshall-Margel and Shapard (2011) A reply arguing that factors the parole analysis overlooked could account for the pattern. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1110910108
📃 Glöckner (2016) Simulations showing the same-sized effect could come from favourable rulings simply taking longer than unfavourable ones. https://doi.org/10.1017/s1930297500004812
📃 Perry and colleagues (2025) Scoping review of decision fatigue in hospitals. Nearly 13,000 citations screened, sixteen studies, half of them abstracts. https://doi.org/10.1002/jhm.13550
📃 Schmidt and colleagues (2007) Time of day affects attention, executive function and memory, and depends on whether it is your good hour. https://doi.org/10.1080/02643290701754158
📃 Nowack and Van der Meer (2018) Morning types outperformed evening types and handled their off-peak hours better. https://doi.org/10.1080/07420528.2018.1500477
📃 Pencavel (2015) Output rose in step with hours up to a threshold, then rose more and more slowly above it. https://doi.org/10.1111/ecoj.12166
📃 Collewet and Sauermann (2017) Call centre agents took longer per call as their hours went up, within the same day. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.labeco.2017.03.006
📃 Nohria and Gulati (1996) An inverse U between organisational slack and innovation. Too little and too much are both bad. https://doi.org/10.2307/256998
📃 Nohria and Gulati (1997) A follow-up asking what the optimum amount of organisational slack actually is. https://doi.org/10.1016/s0263-2373(97)00044-3
📃 Nijp and colleagues (2012) 63 papers from 53 studies. Control over your own working time went with better balance and better job outcomes. https://doi.org/10.5271/sjweh.3307
📃 Kelly and colleagues (2014) A randomised workplace trial. Training supervisors and rethinking when and where people work raised schedule control. https://doi.org/10.1177/0003122414531435
📃 Bergeron and colleagues (2013) 3,680 employees. Time given to helping came out of time given to the task, and showed up in pay and promotion. https://doi.org/10.1177/0149206311407508
📃 Akinola, Martin and Phillips (2018) Gender differences in the feelings people attach to handing work to somebody else. https://doi.org/10.5465/amj.2016.0662
📃 Leana (1986) 44 supervisors and 198 claims adjusters. What predicts delegation, and what follows from it. https://doi.org/10.2307/255943
📃 Palen (1999) Shared calendars make time allocation public, which invites both useful inference and peer judgement. https://doi.org/10.1145/302979.302982
📃 Blandford and Green (2001) Group and individual time management tools, and the gap between what they offer and what people need. https://doi.org/10.1007/pl00000020
📃 Cranshaw and colleagues (2017) A year of real deployments scheduling meetings by breaking the job into small, repeatable pieces. https://doi.org/10.1145/3025453.3025780
📃 Dutton and Ashford (1993) Issue selling: how people below the top get senior attention pointed at something. https://doi.org/10.2307/258903
📃 Dutton and colleagues (2001) The moves that matter in issue selling, and how they relate to change actually happening. https://doi.org/10.2307/3069412
📃 Dutton and colleagues (2002) How exclusive the culture felt was the strongest signal of whether people would raise an issue at all. https://doi.org/10.1287/orsc.13.4.355.2949
📃 Orlikowski and Yates (2002) Temporal structures are made and remade by ordinary repeated action, and then shape the rhythm of the work. https://doi.org/10.1287/orsc.13.6.684.501
📃 Mohammed and Nadkarni (2011) 71 teams. Leaders who actively shaped how the team handled time raised performance directly. https://doi.org/10.5465/amj.2011.61967991
📃 Mohammed and Nadkarni (2014) 71 teams. Sharing a picture of the timing softened the cost of people working at different speeds. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0035640
📃 Gersick (1988) Eight teams followed end to end. Progress came in bursts, triggered by awareness of time rather than of work done. https://doi.org/10.2307/256496
📃 Gevers, Rutte and Van Eerde (2006) 31 groups. Shared thinking about timing decided whether a deadline was met, and reminders helped build it. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1464-0597.2006.00228.x
P.P.S. Why Do I Even Have the Nerve to Write This?
Fair question.
I am someone who has spent years working alongside remarkable executives, navigating chaos, translating vision into structure and figuring things out, sometimes beautifully and sometimes the very hard way. I have had the privilege of being the steady right hand to leaders who move fast, take risks and expect a lot. That environment has shaped me more than any classroom ever could.
I also happen to have an MBA, and I am studying psychology because people fascinate me. How we work. Why we disconnect. What actually holds us together when the pressure rises.
But really, none of that is the point.
I am here because I have lived the erosion and rebuilt from it. I have seen the cost of carrying too much and the relief that arrives when you finally stop disappearing inside your own competence.
So I share what I have learned in case it helps someone else. Take what is useful. Leave the rest. And remember this one truth that professionals like you often forget:
You are probably doing far better than you give yourself credit for.
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