Chief of Staff. Most senior leaders are wrong about what is actually slowing them down. Four things decide it. Free 5-min assessment tells you which is yours ↓
Roseville, Minnesota
Joined February 2008
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I'm not sure if I would categorize this movie as "Romance"... Good 90s flick, but "Twisted" might be a better category. 🤣
1/ Most senior leaders think they have a time problem.
Almost none of them do.
Here's the framework I use instead, after years as a Chief of Staff watching executives fix the wrong thing.
10/ The calendar is an excellent diagnostic and a terrible cause.
Find which of the four is actually yours before you spend a quarter fixing the wrong one.
bobstanke.com/eoi
9/ And why most executives are wrong about their own constraint.
Time is where every constraint shows symptoms.
Broken intake looks like a full calendar. Slow decisions look like a full calendar. Poor delegation looks like a full calendar.
8/ Which is why time management keeps failing.
You fix your calendar. Your intake is untouched. Within a month the calendar has refilled, and you conclude you lack discipline.
You don't. You fixed one layer below the problem.
7/ Here's the part that matters:
The system moves at the speed of its tightest component.
Improving a downstream component while an upstream one is broken produces nothing that lasts.
6/ DISTRIBUTION: what leaves your desk.
Delegation, span, and what stops entirely if you're gone for a week with no notice.
Not a planned holiday. Planned absence hides this, because you prepare for it.
5/ DECISIONS: what waits for you, and how long.
Decision rights, latency, the calls that should have been made a level down.
The tell: your team feels blocked rather than busy. You never feel that. Only they do.
4/ ATTENTION: where your time actually goes.
Meetings, the shape of your week, whether two uninterrupted hours exist anywhere in it.
This is the part everyone assumes is the whole system. It isn't.
3/ INTAKE: what reaches you at all.
Channels, reports, requests, escalation paths, standing invitations nobody ever declined.
It's the least examined part of executive work, and it comes first.
2/ An executive is a system that converts attention into outcomes.
Four components determine what comes out:
Intake. Attention. Decisions. Distribution.
They run in that order.
Declining has a visible cost and an invisible benefit.
Say no, and a specific person is specifically disappointed today.
Say yes, and the cost is thinking that now won't happen. Nobody was expecting it. Nobody will miss it.
Calendars don't drift. They ratchet.
Cheapest experiment available to a senior leader:
Pick the recurring report you're least sure about. Stop it. Don't announce it, don't ask.
Wait three weeks.
If nobody asks, you have your answer. If someone does, restart it in a minute.
A third of it goes unmissed.
Reactive work comes from a requester. Strategic work doesn't.
Someone wants 30 minutes. Someone escalates. Someone needs a review by Thursday. Each arrives attached to a person who will follow up.
Nobody sends an invite for thinking about the 3-year plan.
That's the problem.
Four things decide what a senior leader actually produces.
Intake: what reaches you at all.
Attention: where your time goes.
Decisions: what waits on you.
Distribution: what leaves your desk.
Use my tool to score yourself on the four: bobstanke.com/eoi
You clear the calendar. Decline some invites. Protect two mornings.
For about three weeks it works.
Then it fills back up and you assume you got lax.
You didn't. Clearing a calendar changes your availability, not your inflow.
The same volume arrives and takes the space back.
Been quiet here a long time.
Picking it back up with a narrower subject.
I'm a Chief of Staff. The role companies create when an executive's operating system has outgrown them.
Almost nobody writes about that layer.
So that's what I'll be posting about.
