Executive Performance
If your calendar disagrees with your priorities, your calendar is right
You can tell what someone values by looking at where their hours went. This is uncomfortable and extremely useful.
Ask a senior leader what their top three priorities are and you’ll get a clear, considered answer. Ask to see last month’s calendar and you’ll usually get a different answer to the same question.
The gap between those two answers is the most useful diagnostic I know.
The twenty-minute version
Once a quarter, open the last three months of your calendar and do this:
- Write down what you said mattered three months ago. Before you look. This part is not optional: looking first contaminates the answer.
- Now categorise the hours. Rough buckets are fine. Ten minutes, not an audit.
- Compare. Not to feel bad. To find out what the system optimizes for.
Most people find one of three patterns. The priority got real time but no deep time, so it was worked on in fragments and never moved. Or it got deep time in month one and none afterwards, because something urgent colonised the slot. Or it never appeared at all, which usually means it was an aspiration rather than a commitment.
The fix is subtraction
The instinct is to add: block time, get up earlier, be more disciplined. That holds until the first genuinely busy week, because the calendar was already full and nothing was removed to make room.
The question that moves things is narrower and worse: what have I moved to make room for this? If the honest answer is nothing, the priority isn’t a priority yet. It’s a wish with a calendar invite.
You can have anything you want. You cannot have everything you want, on the same Tuesday.
What to do with what you find
Pick one thing to protect and one thing to drop, and be specific about both. “More strategic thinking” is not a thing you can protect. “Thursday 9–11, no meetings, working on the pricing model” is.
Then tell someone. Drift is quiet, and it doesn’t survive contact with a person who asks about it in six weeks.
