Managing Executive capacity is one of those aspects of the job that never makes it into an EA job description, but it takes up most of your day. Let me give you an example: a person has asked for a meeting with your Executive; there is a thirty-minute gap at 11am; the person asking has been waiting a week for you to confirm a time, so you put the meeting in the diary. In theory, that time should work, but you already know your Executive comes out of board prep at 10.30 and will go into a difficult conversation with a direct report at 11.45. The gap between those two meetings is really important to keep clear so they can plan accordingly.
We know that most people will look at our Executive’s schedule, and if there is a free slot, the assumption is that our Executive is available. A lot of the time, as EAs, we go along with that kind of thinking, partly because our Executive will want to take the meeting and the pressures are there from all sides, but also because there is no obvious language for saying, “Yes, they are available, but there is nothing left of them today.” Managing Executive capacity starts with being able to communicate that issue.
So this blog post is about that gap. What capacity actually means and how it is different from availability, how to tell when your Executive is running low on it before they say anything to you, and the four things you have real control over here – what reaches them, when it reaches them, what gets decided without them ever seeing it, and how much of the thinking you can do before anything lands on their desk.
This template is a resource to help you manage responsibilities effectively, improve alignment with your executive, and maintain organized, consistent support.
Let’s look at the difference between availability and capacity. Availability is the number of hours in the day that are free. Capacity is how much energy your Executive has left to think with, decide with and take something new on board. We treat those two things as the same, but they are rarely the same at all.
Take two Executives with identical diaries on a Wednesday. They both have four hours of meetings and two hours free. One of them has spent the morning in a supplier review that went well and can cope with a new problem at 3pm without blinking. The other has been in a redundancy conversation, a difficult board call, and dealt with a complaint from your biggest customer, so by 3pm the two hours they had free are not clear at all. They are needed for your Executive to recover.
When we are talking about managing Executive capacity, you might think we are talking about the hours in their day, but really that is the least useful measurement of their day. It is more helpful to think about what actually uses capacity up. Once you see where their energy goes, you can start protecting their capacity:
Managing Executive capacity for an Assistant means focusing on those four things, not just on the meetings that go into your Executive’s schedule. Take the last example: being the only person who can settle something; plenty of what gets kicked up the chain to your Executive only reaches them because no one else has the authority to deal with it. That is a lot on your Executive’s shoulders.
Managing Executive capacity has always been part of the Assistant job, but it has absolutely got harder. I do not want to generalize here because some Executives run small, contained teams, and their weeks have not changed much over the past ten years. But for a lot of the Executives we support, two things have shifted at the same time.
The first is structural. Organizations have flattened; layers of middle management have gone, and the people who used to absorb decisions a few levels down to our Executives are no longer there, so decisions now go to our Executives more often. That means more direct reports, more one-to-one meetings, more sign-offs required. According to Gallup, the average manager in the United States is now responsible for more people than at any point since Gallup began tracking this metric in 2013.
The second is that they are reachable everywhere. Email, Teams, Slack, WhatsApp, text, and the phone if all else fails. A request that would once have waited for the Monday meeting now arrives at nine o’clock on a Sunday night. Because everything is digital, and we are all guilty of this, we don’t feel like we are interrupting anyone’s day because we haven’t physically had to interrupt anyone to communicate with them and send the message. For your Executive, multiply that by however many people have their mobile numbers, and you will realize just how bombarded they are.
There is also the issue of hybrid working. Some of the natural pauses your Executive would have had in the office has gone, such as the five minute wealk between meeting rooms, it’s not much but it’s enough of a break to prepare for the next meeting. Back-to-back video calls give you none of it. So managing Executive capacity has become a bigger part of the job than it used to be, without anyone formally handing it over.
I had an Executive years ago who had been under real pressure for months. I walked into her office one morning, and there was a pile of gym clothes in the corner, and sitting on top of them was a bag of shopping that had clearly been there a while, full of salad that never made it home and never got eaten at her desk either. She had bought it, meaning to eat properly that week. She had packed the gym bag, meaning to go.
That is what a full Executive looks like. It’s not a really busy calendar, but a person whose good intentions have stopped happening, because she has nothing left in the tank to dedicate to herself.
Most of managing Executive capacity is noticing that early. Those early signs are smaller than a bag of salad, and they are easy to miss when you are busy yourself. These are the ones I would watch for:
None of those on their own mean very much. But together, they add up to an Executive who is at full capacity. If you spot any of the signs, before you bring it up with your Executive, ask yourself a few questions first. Is this a bad fortnight because of a deadline, or has it been like this since the spring? Is it every part of their work, or one area that has gone wrong? Are they still making the decisions they enjoy making, or has that gone too?
The answers change what you do next. If it is just a bad fortnight, you can manage that by protecting their schedule. If it’s been going on for six months, this needs a proper conversation, and probably some of the work delegated permanently. Managing Executive capacity looks completely different in those two situations. If you mistake a bad few weeks for a longer-term problem, it’s easy to think your Executive is just busy rather than having way too much work.
So what do you do when your Executive is maxxed out? The first thing you can help with is what work gets to them at all, and how it arrives.
Most of us will send things as they come in. For example, an email arrives at 9.15, if we can’t answer it, we tend to pass it on to our Executive at 9.16, which is really efficient, but by the end of the day we have probably interrupted our Executive multiple times. It seems harmless, but every interruption (whether by email or knocking on their office door) pulls them out of whatever they were thinking about.
Instead of working in that way, hold on to things. Keep a running list through the day, and send one message late morning and one late afternoon with everything on it, each item written so it can be answered with a yes, a no, a name or a date. Anything genuinely urgent should still go straight through to your Executive, and it helps to decide in advance what urgent means so you are not guessing. Mine was always: somebody is waiting in reception; anything to do with high-level projects or a client; or a decision is required that day (genuinely).
This is a big part of managing Executive capacity, and it costs you nothing except a bit of discipline. You will also find that when you keep that running list, three or four items a day fall off on their own because somebody sorted them out while they were waiting for a decision from your Executive.
The second thing you can help with is where in the day something lands because most Executives have a part of the day when they make good decisions and a part when they do not. You can see it by watching them for a few weeks and writing down what you see. Once you spot the pattern, you can build the week around it. Put decisions and anything that needs real thought in their good hours. Reviews, updates and the meetings where they mostly listen go in the other ones. Here are a few other things that are worth doing, whatever your Executive is like:
Going back to that example of the Thursday 11am gap. Managing Executive capacity does mean looking at what sits either side of a calendar slot before you put anything in there, and being willing to say to the person asking that Thursday does not work but Friday at nine does, even going so far as to say they will get a better meeting with the Executive on Friday. Most people accept that without a second thought. We are usually far more worried about saying it than they are about hearing it.
The third thing, and the one that makes the most difference for our Executives, is how much work never reaches them because you dealt with it. This is the part of managing Executive capacity that is worth its weight in gold.
Everything that lands on your desk for your Executive falls into one of four groups:
Most of us already work this way; we have probably never really thought of it this way before. It’s handy to think about which tasks fit into each category. Once you have a good understanding of what you are deciding without your Executive, it should give you more confidence to start to move more things into that bracket. You can also talk to your Executive about it. The conversation does not need to be a big one. “I’ve been dealing with x, y and z without coming to you, and it seems to be working. Are you happy for me to keep doing that, and is there anything on that list you want to keep, or is there anything more you’d like me to add?” Most Executives say yes to more than you expect, because really, every item you take is an item they do not have to think about. Some will want to keep one thing that looks trivial to you, and that is useful to know too.
When it comes to Executive capacity, the group that needs the most attention is the third one. A surprising amount of what comes to your Executive should have gone to the Finance Director, or to the person who owns the project, and it comes to your Executive because they ultimately have more authority and your colleagues see it as the quicker move – going to the top rather than the task making its way through the ranks. Watch this one and send the work and decision where it needs to go.
The fourth thing you control is the format of what you send when work or decisions do need to go to your Executive. This is the last piece of managing Executive capacity, and it is the easiest one to start today.
The same problem can cost your Executive four minutes or forty, depending on how much of the work is already done. This is the one place where a small change in how you write a message gives you back real time in their week.
Instead of sending:
“There’s a clash on Thursday, what do you want to do?”
Try:
“There’s a clash on Thursday between the investor call and the leadership review. I can move the investor call to 1pm, which keeps your prep time, or push the leadership review to Friday morning, which means the papers go out a day late. I’d suggest moving the investor call. I’ll go ahead with that unless you’d rather not.”
Can you see the difference? The first one hands them a problem and asks them to solve it from scratch. The second option gives them a problem, but it’s already been thought through, with the consequences of each option spelt out, and a default that happens even if they don’t reply, which means a busy Executive doesn’t even have to reply and the right thing still happens.
You do not need to redesign anything to start. Pick one week and do two things.
Make a list of the small tasks and decisions, and send it in two batches instead of as it arrives, and see what falls off the list on its own.
Then, before you fill any gap in the diary, look at what is either side of it and ask whether your Executive is in the best place to attend that meeting.
Managing Executive capacity is one of the highest value things an Assistant does, and it is almost impossible to see from the outside, because when you do it well, the day goes better than it might have done. So write it down as you go. What you stopped, what you decided without them, what you sent to someone else, and what you protected.
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