Something keeps showing up in my work with organizations around how people are spending their time and their perspective around productivity. When leadership teams commit to creating more space for strategic priorities, the first thing we do is look at where time is actually going. These time audits are rarely comfortable reading.
A third of the time, on average, is sitting in meetings. And most of these meetings are status updates, check-ins, and recurring calendar holds. The remaining time is scattered across work that’s urgent, demanding attention without really deserving it.
When I ask leaders how much of their week they spend on the work that only they can do, the number is almost always uncomfortably small. Sometimes they can’t name it at all.
And then there’s the meeting problem inside the meeting problem. It’s not just the volume of meetings. It’s what happens inside them. Anyone who has sat in a ninety-minute session that somehow never arrived at a decision knows the feeling. The conversation circles. Someone restates what the previous person said in slightly different words. A tangent opens up and the group follows it. Fifteen minutes before the hour someone asks where we landed, and the answer, more often than not, is nowhere anyone can act on. The meeting ends. A follow-up gets scheduled. The cycle continues. When the distinction between discussion, decision and problem solving is blurred, meetings become a place where thinking happens out loud indefinitely, with no real mechanism for landing the plane.
The cost is not just time. It’s momentum. Every meeting that ends without a clear owner, a clear action, and a clear deadline sends a signal that ambiguity is acceptable and that follow-through is optional. Over time, that signal shapes a culture. And cultures built around conversation without consequence produce exactly the kind of calendar gridlock the time audits keep revealing. That pattern, across industries, across sectors, across organizations of very different sizes and cultures, points to something deeper than a scheduling problem.
The question I keep coming back to is this: if the people in these organizations are smart, capable, and genuinely committed to doing good work, why does the pattern persist? Why do the same inefficiencies show up in a healthcare system, a tech company, a municipal government, a university? The people are different. The missions are different. The calendars look remarkably the same.
Part of the answer is structural. Meetings multiply. Inboxes expand. Organizations develop a kind of institutional momentum around busyness that takes real effort to interrupt. But structure alone doesn’t explain it, because the leaders most consumed by low-value activity are often the ones with the most authority to change it.
The more honest explanation is that busyness, is a signal. And the signal isn’t coming from the calendar. It’s coming from somewhere much older than that.
There’s a question I ask executives near the start of almost every coaching engagement. “How do you know you’ve had a productive day?” Most people don’t have an answer that satisfies them.
Most of us inherited a definition of productivity we never consciously chose. You stayed late and someone noticed. You responded fast and got called reliable. You took on more and got promoted. The behavior got reinforced. And so the belief took root: you are as valuable as what you produce.
Once that belief lives at the identity level, busyness stops being a symptom. It becomes a strateg for feeling safe, for proving worth, for staying in good standing with an internal standard that was set a long time ago. The packed calendar is evidence of a story that’s still running.
Which is why changing the calendar never quite works the way it’s supposed to. Radical prioritization, the kind that actually sticks, starts with a different question than “how do I protect my time?” It starts with: what is the work that only I can do? Not what you’re good at. Not what you’ve always done. Not what people expect from you. The work where your specific judgment, your relationships, your experience, and your way of seeing things create results that nothing and no one else can replicate. Three things, maybe four. That’s where your time belongs. Everything else is a negotiation.
Brian Tracy called it eating the frog. Do the hardest, highest-value thing first, before the day fills up with everything easier and louder and more immediately satisfying to cross off. The advice is sound. The reason most leaders don’t follow it is that they’ve never done the harder work of identifying which frog is actually theirs to eat. And without that clarity, the default is to eat whatever lands in front of them.
The time audits make this visible in a way that’s hard to argue with. When a leadership team can see, in aggregate, that a third of their collective capacity is going to meetings of questionable necessity and the majority of the rest is going to work that could be delegated, automated, or dropped entirely, the conversation changes. It stops being about working harder and starts being about working from a fundamentally different set of choices.
That’s where AI enters the conversation, and not in the way it usually does.The discussion around AI in the workplace tends to go one of two directions. Either it’s framed as a threat, jobs at risk, humans displaced, or it’s framed as a miracle, infinite leverage, effortless output. Both framings miss the more immediate and practical point.
A meaningful portion of the low-value work consuming leadership capacity right now, drafting routine communications, summarizing documents, organizing information, preparing first-pass analyses, can be handled by AI tools that do it competently and without the opportunity cost. Every hour spent on work AI can do is an hour not spent on the work only a particular human being, with their particular history and relationships and way of thinking, can do.
The leaders who will have the most impact in the next decade are going to be the ones who are clear, ruthlessly clear, about where their attention creates value that can’t be replicated, and who build their days around that.
None of this is easy, and it would be dishonest to suggest otherwise.
Letting go of low-value activities requires trusting that your worth isn’t contingent on doing them. Exiting meetings requires tolerating the discomfort of not being in the room. Delegating with real authority rather than constant oversight requires releasing a control that, for many leaders, has felt like competence for a very long time.
That’s the unlearning. A genuine reckoning with the story underneath the schedule.
The most counterintuitive thing I’ve witnessed in this work is how much opens up on the other side of that reckoning. Decisions that used to take three meetings get made in one. Conversations that used to circle find their way to the point. Energy that was being spent managing internal noise gets redirected toward the thinking, the connecting, and the deciding that actually moves things. Visit CarolinaCaro.com