Your Calendar Is The Only Strategy Anyone Can Actually Read

Whatever the plan says, the organisation will judge your priorities by where your hours go.

Strategy documents are written once and read rarely. Your diary is published continuously, to everyone, in a form nobody can misread. If the plan names three priorities and two of them never appear in your week, the organisation has correctly concluded that there is one priority. People are extremely good at this inference and extremely quick to make it. They are not being cynical. They are reading the only evidence that updates daily.

The useful exercise is retrospective rather than aspirational. Take the last full month and code every hour against a short list: things only you can do, things you do because they were in the diary when you arrived, things you have taken back from someone else, and things that exist because you have not yet decided something. Most first time chief executives find the second and third categories dominant. Inherited meetings are particularly resilient, because cancelling one requires a reason and continuing it requires none.

The correction is not a productivity system. It is a series of small conversations in which you tell specific people that you will no longer be attending their meeting, and why, and who now holds it. Each of those conversations is mildly unpleasant and permanently useful. Reserve blocks that are genuinely unbookable, and then defend them against the two forces that will eat them, which are your own discomfort with unstructured time and the perfectly reasonable requests of people who have no idea what else is on your plate because you have never told them.