A group of business school scholars have researched just what it is a CEO does during his or her working week.
Groups from the London School of Economics and Harvard Business School have deduced that CEOs tend to spend most of their time locked up in meetings, with 18 hours out of a 55-hour working week dedicated to meetings.
Furthermore, typically three hours are spent on making phone calls, while five hours are dedicated to business meals, cites newser.com.
In order to calculate the figures, CEOs' personal assistants took part in the Executive Time Use Project which urged them to monitor their CEOs activities (any lasting 15 minutes or more) during a single working week.
However, some of the meeting times of CEOs weren't as high as others, which was put down to the employment of a "finance chief or operating chief into the corporate hierarchy", Wall Street Journal revealed.
The research also reveals the "optimal inside/outside" balance, showing that CEOs need to spend more time internally: "Time devoted to activities that mostly benefit the firm is more strongly correlated with productivity than time devoted to activities that mostly yield private benefits."
Rory Cowan, CEO of tech-services firm Lionbridge Technologies Inc., echoed this; claiming he is constantly communicating with staff and clients. "I don't know when I'm not in a meeting," he explained.
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