From Availability to Attention: The New CEO Productivity Playbook

Aug 8 / Severin Sorensen
When decisions move at the speed of algorithms and strategic shifts occur in weeks, not years, the classic time management playbook fails even the most disciplined executives. The age of calendar stuffing, time blocking, and inbox zero has hit a ceiling. Today’s CEOs and business leaders are beginning to operate from a new playbook—one that values attention over availability, intention over immediacy, and energy over efficiency.

The Myth of Linear Productivity

For decades, leadership productivity has been synonymous with structure: color-coded calendars, 15-minute check-ins, and meticulously triaged inboxes. But in nonlinear, AI-accelerated environments, linear systems strain under exponential change. Leadership today is less about controlling time and more about creating space.

Traditional calendar systems are optimized for transactional tasks, not transformational thinking. In high-stakes leadership, the cost of constant context switching and over-scheduling is cognitive depletion. It robs leaders of the very thing they’re paid to do: think deeply, intuit strategically, and decide courageously.

Consider the following:
  • Office workers switch tasks on average every three minutes and five seconds (Mark et al., 2005)
  • It takes an average of 23 minutes and 15 seconds to return to the original task after an interruption (Gonzalez & Mark, 2005)
  • CEOs spend an average 72% of their time in meetings per week (De Smet et al., 2023)
  • CEOs have 37 meetings on average per week (Porter et al., 2018)


In such a structure, deep strategic work often falls by the wayside.

Attention Is the New Scarcity

Nancy Kline’s groundbreaking framework, Time to Think, challenges us to consider that the best decisions arise not from speed, but from space. Her methodology emphasizes generative attention—the uninterrupted, high-quality presence that unlocks deeper insight and creativity.

This kind of attention is becoming a CEO’s rarest resource. Meetings without pause, back-to-back Zooms, and reactive email cycles erode a leader’s capacity for big-picture synthesis.

Generative attention isn’t found in a color block. It’s built into the white space between commitments.

The Rise of AI Executive Guardrails

The most forward-thinking leaders are turning to AI to do more than automate routine tasks—they're using it to curate their cognitive bandwidth. AI agents like Reclaim.ai, Howie.ai, and custom GPT-4 integrations are beginning to:
  • Pre-filter decisions based on strategic priorities and previous decisions
  • Draft or respond to emails to maintain tone and context without manual typing
  • Schedule proactively by identifying when leaders are most cognitively available—not just free
  • Flag focus drift when patterns show over-indexing on low-leverage meetings

Asynchronous Leadership: Leading Without the Micromanage

Just as remote work ushered in asynchronous workflows, a similar movement is redefining how leadership itself operates. Asynchronous leadership emphasizes:
  • Narrative clarity over real-time availability
  • Outcome-based check-ins over hour-by-hour updates
  • Systems of trust over constant supervision


This shift is giving leaders back swaths of time, but more importantly, it’s restoring mental altitude. Instead of being on every call, today’s CEOs are writing powerful memos, deploying video briefings, or using AI-generated insights to scale their presence.

Designing the Anti-Calendar

So, what does an "anti-calendar" actually look like? It’s about being intentionally unstructured in the right places. Here’s a blueprint many modern executives are adopting:
  1. Time for Thinking: Block 3-6 hours a week for uninterrupted strategy reflection. No screen, no meeting.
  2. Decision Windows: Schedule periods when your brain is freshest (morning for most) for high-leverage choices.
  3. AI-Curated Briefings: Replace status meetings with auto-generated summaries from project tools and comms platforms.
  4. White Space Rituals: Leave at least 10-15% of each day unscheduled. This is not free time—this is space for real-time decisions, reflection, or recovery.
  5. Quarterly Calendar Purge: Every 90 days, audit and delete 15% of recurring commitments.

The Courage to Reclaim Attention

The anti-calendar is about conscious design. It requires the courage to say no to the good in order to protect the great. It requires the humility to let AI handle the repetitive, so humans can focus on the irreplaceable. After all, leaders who win won’t be those who do more—but those who create more time to think. The anti-calendar may just be their greatest strategic asset.

As Peter Drucker once said, “There is nothing so useless as doing efficiently that which should not be done at all.” Let’s rethink meetings and replace those that drain value with formats—and white space—that energize and innovate.

References

De Smet, A., Gagnon, C., & Mygatt, E. (2023). The state of organizations 2023. McKinsey & Company. Retrieved from https://www.mckinsey.com/capabilities/people-and-organizational-performance/our-insights/the-state-of-organizations-2023

Gonzalez, V. M., & Mark, G. (2005). “Constant, constant, multitasking craziness”: managing multiple working spheres. Proceedings of the SIGCHI conference on Human factors in computing systems, 113-120.

Mark, G., Gonzalez, V. M., & Harris, J. (2005). No task left behind?: examining the nature of fragmented work. Proceedings of the SIGCHI conference on Human factors in computing systems, 321-330.

Porter, M. E., & Nohria, N. (2018). How CEOs manage time. Harvard Business Review, 96(4), 42–51.

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