A quick summer experiment that could change the way you lead
One of the most common patterns I see in senior leaders is not a lack of ambition, but a lack of design in their diary.
When your calendar is filled by default rather than designed by intention, the costs are real: decisions made in haste rather than with all the clarity they deserve, strategic thinking squeezed into the margins, and communication on the fly with teams left unclear on what really matters.
Almost every leader I work with recognises a similar tension. The hope that if you just push through this month, things will ease. The fear that slowing down might mean missing something important. The dream of creating space to think, exercise, or spend time with family without guilt. And the frustration of another week back-to-back in meetings, only to realise nothing significant has moved forward.
The challenge is that a well managed calendar is a practice of alignment. And your diary signals your leadership priorities more than any speech or strategy document.
Yet the skill of time management is not a ‘one and done’ achievement, nor something that you are either good at or not. Because your calendar is not static, and the pull and pressure on your time changes as the weeks, and as your career evolves.
Some leaders run a time audit, tracking where their hours really go. Others strip their diary back to essentials and rebuild from there. However small experiments are often the fastest way to discover what actually works, right now – for you, for your role, and for the season you’re in.
One quick way to start is simply to use the tools around you – and ChatGPT can be one of them.
Not having it make choices for you, but by showing your choices more clearly. It can cut through noise, test assumptions, and surface the trade-offs you tend to avoid.
Used well, can be less a tool and more a thought partner; the kind that asks sharper questions than you usually ask yourself.
Rather than try and design for perfection, take two weeks and run them as an experiment. Decide how you want to show up and what’s most important. Build a plan that reflects that. Run it. And then reflect. If one thing works, but five don’t, keep the one thing and experiment with a few more new ones. Then repeat. Every iteration and improvement will help you over time.
To get real value, you need to give ChatGPT the truth. Not the polished version you’d present to others, but the reality: how you spend your time, what you want more of, what slips away too easily.
Put that on the table, and the questions you get back will be sharper.
If you want to give it a try, the key is in how you frame the request. Don’t ask ChatGPT to “plan my week” – that will just give you a neat timetable.
Instead, ask it to act as a thought partner. Give it the raw inputs of your life, for example what you’re doing now, what you want more of, what frustrates you, what keeps slipping. Then ask it to respond with reflective questions that will help you think differently about your time.
That might sound like this:
“Here’s my reality: I work 8am–7pm most days, which leaves me almost no time for exercise or family. I’d love to wrap up early one day, and spend it outside with my family. I want to carve out more space for reflection and reading too, but it rarely happens. I want to experiment with the next two weeks so I end with more energy, clarity, and a sense of progress. Act as my thought partner and ask me reflective questions to help me design it.”
If you start there, what you’ll often get back are questions like:
What are you spending most of your time on right now?
What exactly do you want more of in your week?
What do you want less of?
What patterns are you noticing that frustrate you?
Over the next two weeks, what would leave you finishing with energy, clarity, and a sense of progress?
And as you go deeper:
What do you need to say no to in order to make this possible?
If your diary truly reflected your priorities, what would change?
What rhythm of work, rest, and reflection would help you make better decisions?
If you treated this as a two-week experiment, what’s the one shift you’d want to test?
The point here is not the tool – it’s creating a moment of reflection space to move your diary from default to design.
Whether you do it with ChatGPT or a blank notebook page, the value comes from the questions you’re willing to sit with.
Because in the end it’s not about managing time, it’s about having clarity on what matters most, and the discipline to own it.
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