August 19, 2026 · 4 min read
CEOs sit in 37 meetings a week. That's 72% of their working time
Rev's data on executive time is bracing. LSE puts 35% of business meetings as unproductive. The way out of the exec-time trap isn't fewer meetings, it's fewer unprepared ones.
The number Rev pulled from their analysis of executive calendars: the average CEO has at least 37 meetings a week, which works out to roughly 72% of their working time. LSE's 2024 data on the same slice put 35% of all business meetings as unproductive. Robert Walters' 2024 executive survey found that 67% of leaders still prefer in-person for the meetings that actually decide things.
That combination is what makes the exec time trap so hard to solve. Cutting meetings sounds appealing until you realise the meetings you cut are the ones you couldn't afford to skip. The 25% of decisions that get made in the meetings that the CEO shouldn't have missed. And the meetings that were unproductive are, by definition, the ones that felt safe to cancel, right up until the decision they were supposed to reach lands as a follow-up meeting on next week's calendar.
The instinct is to declare a meeting diet. Cap the CEO's calendar at 20 hours a week. Delegate. Push meetings down. These work, sort of, for a while, and then the meetings creep back up because the CEO's calendar is the aggregation of every cross-functional decision that needs a signal from the top, and cutting the calendar doesn't cut the decisions.
The move that changes the shape of the calendar without cutting the count is prepared meetings. Not fewer meetings. Fewer unprepared ones.
In practice: the CEO opens Monday and sees the meetings that have a brief (the owner set it up, the attendees read it and weighed in, and the owner answered every reaction). Those run. The CEO walks in already knowing what the decision on the table is, what the trade-off is, and which position they're being asked to break the tie on. The other meetings, the ones where the owner didn't get to the brief in time, aren't on the CEO's Monday at all. They were rescheduled automatically to slots later in the week with more runway.
The 37 meetings a week doesn't necessarily go down. What changes is that 37 becomes 37 meetings the CEO can actually add to, instead of 37 meetings the CEO sits in while someone else catches everyone up. Same time, different product.
The chief of staff running the CEO's calendar can enforce this by hand today, and every good one does. The question is whether it should require a chief of staff. The calendar layer can enforce the same rule without anyone having to chase it, on every calendar in the org, not just the CEO's.
No brief, no meeting
Every qualified meeting gets a brief that everyone reads beforehand, with a chance to share their voice. If the brief isn't set up in time, the meeting is rescheduled automatically and everyone is told.
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