By: Kate Sarmiento
Before 6 a.m., about 40 percent of employees have already checked their email (Source: Microsoft, 2025). The workday used to have a clear start and a clear finish, and for a large share of people it now has neither. That raises a question that sits at the center of the work Dr. Sharon Spano does at Spano & Company, which is what a packed schedule costs the person who keeps it.
Dr. Spano is a Business Strategist who does executive coaching with an emphasis on human development. She works with high-impact leaders, including CEOs, entrepreneurs, consultants, and coaches. The leaders she describes have built successful businesses and worked hard to do it, and some of them still sense that something is missing. A calendar with no open space is one place that feeling can hide, because it leaves no time to ask what all the effort is for.
The research on how leaders spend their time is specific, and it covers three areas that matter to anyone running a business or a team, which are the quality of their decisions, the quality of their leadership, and their sense that life is going somewhere worth going. It also points to changes a leader can start making this week.
When Your Calendar Starts Making Your Decisions
Time pressure shows up first in the choices a leader makes. In one lab experiment, 42 volunteers gave a stressful mock job pitch and then worked through packing puzzles with a time limit. Stress by itself had little to no effect on how well they decided, but once a tight deadline was added, their accuracy on problems that had a workable answer dropped from 83 percent to 57 percent, which is barely better than guessing (Source: University of Melbourne, 2026). The group was small, and the researchers are still running follow-up studies, so the result is early, but it points to a risky mix for anyone who has to decide something right after a stressful moment with the clock running.
Attention takes a hit as well. When researchers first measured it more than 20 years ago, people stayed on a single screen for about two and a half minutes on average, and by 2020 that number had fallen to 47 seconds (Source: University of California, 2024). Recovering from one interruption can take almost half an hour, and about half of all interruptions come from people interrupting themselves, such as the urge to check email or look something up (Source: University of California, 2024).
The workday itself adds to the problem. The average employee receives 117 emails and 153 Teams messages a day, 57 percent of meetings are ad hoc calls with no calendar invite, and 29 percent of active workers are back in their inbox by 10 p.m. (Source: Microsoft, 2025). Nearly half of employees (48 percent) and more than half of leaders (52 percent) say their work feels chaotic and fragmented (Source: Microsoft, 2025). That matches the rushed, interrupted conditions described in the research above.
The Bill Shows Up Where Your Budget Never Looks
Large-company CEOs give a clear picture of how far a workweek can stretch. When 27 of them had their time tracked in 15-minute blocks over three months, they averaged 62.5 hours of work a week. They also worked about 3.9 hours a day on weekends and about 2.4 hours a day on vacation, and they slept an average of 6.9 hours a night (Source: Harvard Business Review, 2018).
The same data showed how much of that time went to their own priorities. The CEOs spent an average of 43 percent of their time on activities that supported the agenda they said they were pursuing, and the share ranged from 14 percent for one leader to 80 percent for another (Source: Harvard Business Review, 2018). The authors advised every leader to keep a personal agenda, since without one the demands of the loudest groups take over (Source: Harvard Business Review, 2018).
The cost reaches beyond work. Over the last two decades, global wealth has grown, yet most people still report feeling persistently short on time, and that feeling is linked to lower well-being, poorer physical health, and lower productivity (Source: Nature Human Behaviour, 2020). Money, in other words, has not solved the time problem.
Dr. Spano’s work focuses on this experience. She calls one version of it the Emptiness of Success, where a leader is successful and works hard and still senses that something is missing. Her website says the goal of her work is to help leaders have more time and energy for the people they love and to enjoy the success they have built, and one of her stated core values is that family matters most.
How to Take Back Your Schedule Without Blowing It Up
A good first step is to write down the few outcomes that matter most this quarter. The CEOs in the Harvard data spent 43 percent of their time on their stated agenda, so even leaders with a clear agenda gave more than half of their hours to other things. A short written list gives a leader something to check each request against before saying yes.
Meetings are the next place to look. The CEOs spent 72 percent of their time in meetings, with one hour the most common length, and they told the researchers that one-hour meetings could often be cut to 30 minutes or even 15 (Source: Harvard Business Review, 2018). Picking one recurring meeting this week and cutting its length in half is a small test that costs very little.
Thinking time needs a spot on the calendar too. The Harvard authors recommended setting aside meaningful blocks of time alone and protecting them from the inbox (Source: Harvard Business Review, 2018). The attention researcher quoted earlier suggests finding the time of day when your focus is strongest and putting the most important task there, then planning breaks for when your energy starts to fade, before exhaustion sets in (Source: University of California, 2024).
Goals also slip out of mind quickly, so writing the day’s main goal on a sticky note and keeping it in view is worth doing (Source: University of California, 2024). Each of these changes gives a leader more say in how the day gets spent.
Ready to Rethink Your Relationship With Time?
Scheduling changes are a practical start, and Dr. Sharon Spano also works with leaders on the hidden patterns that hold them back. Her private Systemic Mapping session is described on her website as a way to identify and remove hidden obstacles that keep a leader from reaching the next level, and to learn how to integrate work and life without sacrificing vision or goals.
Leaders who would rather read first can pick up her book, The Pursuit of Time and Money: Step into Radical Abundance and Discover the Secret to a Meaningful and Prosperous Life. Leaders who are ready for a conversation can contact Spano & Company to learn more about Systemic Mapping.
Disclaimer: This article is for informational and educational purposes only. The views and information presented should not be considered professional advice. Individual experiences and results may vary.
