What Do CEOs Actually Do?

While we realize that corporate leaders are really busy, we know surprisingly little about their day-to-day schedules. To fill that gap, in 2006 Harvard Business School professors Michael Porter and Nitin Nohria began asking participants of their New CEO Workshop to track their use of time, 24/7, for 13 weeks. The data on these pages, which were created with assistance from Harvard Business School research associate Sarah Higgins, summarizes the information gathered on how 27 CEOs spent a total of nearly 60,000 hours. Here is how they allocated their time, on average, among various activities, places, priorities, meetings, and constituencies.