How do business leaders spend their working days? This was first published in Business Strategy Review, Volume 22, Issue 4 - 2011. Subscribe today to receive your quarterly copy delivered to your home or work place. http://bit.ly/BSR-subscribe

1. © Copyright 2014 London Business School
Clocking in
Meetings, emails, thinking? How do business
leaders spend their working days?

2. BUSINESS STRATEGY REVIEW 2
CEO time
60% of CEO time is taken up by meetings; CEOs
spend 25% of their time on phone calls and at public
events; only 15% of CEO time is spent working alone.
bnet.com
60% 15%25%

3. BUSINESS STRATEGY REVIEW 3
Work-related
56% of managers visit work-related websites during
their free time and 30% read work-related books.
Chartered Management Institute
56% 30%

4. BUSINESS STRATEGY REVIEW 4
Time with others
CEOs spend the majority of their time with other people
(83%). Of these, most are employees of the same firm,
but many are not. On average, CEOs spend 42% of
their time with insiders only, 25% with both insiders and
outsiders and 16% with outsiders alone.
hbs.edu
42%
INSIDERSONLY
0% 100%50%
25%
BOTHINSIDERS
ANDOUTSIDERS
0% 100%50%
16%
OUTSIDERS
ALONE
0% 100%50%
12
TIMESPENTWITHOTHERS
83%

5. BUSINESS STRATEGY REVIEW 5
Workouts
85% of CEOs say they exercise daily. 70% begin their
day with a workout of some kind while 15% exercise
between meetings or during a lunch hour.
Yahoo!Finance
70%
15%

6. BUSINESS STRATEGY REVIEW 6
Unpaid work
Managers spend an average of 2.5 hours a week
doing unpaid research in their own time.
randstad.co.uk
12

7. BUSINESS STRATEGY REVIEW 7
Lunch breaks
Executives take an average lunch break of
35 minutes, though they also work through lunch
three days a week.
keyorganization.com
12

8. BUSINESS STRATEGY REVIEW 8
Information searches
Managers spend up to two hours a day searching
for information; yet the same managers felt half the
information they found to be useless.
academic-journal.org
12

9. BUSINESS STRATEGY REVIEW 9
Industry breakdown
Across industries, managers spend 30% to 60% of their
time on administrative work and meetings and 10% to 50%
on non-managerial tasks (travelling, participating in training,
taking breaks, conducting special projects or undertaking
direct customer service or sales themselves). They spend
only 10% to 40% actually managing employees by, for
example, coaching them directly.
forbes.com
ADMINISTRATIVE WORK
NON -MANAGERIAL TASKS
MANAGING EMPLO YEES
30%
60%60%
10%
550%
10%
40%

10. BUSINESS STRATEGY REVIEW 10
Twitter
Just 5% of Fortune 500 CEOs have Twitter accounts.
Only 50% of the accounts are active.
personneltoday.com
550%
ACTIVEACCOUNTS
0% 100%50%
5%

11. BUSINESS STRATEGY REVIEW 11
Paperwork
On average, paperwork and related tasks consume
11.6 hours per week of a manager’s time, with senior
managers both spending more time on these tasks and
finding it more disruptive than middle managers.
getmoredone.com
12 12 12
12 12 12
12

12. This was first published as part of the
‘What a day looks like’ special report,
Business Strategy Review
Volume 22 Issue 4 2011
Visit our website www.london.edu/bsr