Behind the corner office door, what is it that CEOs do all day?
A CEO's job isn't easy to categorize. It cannot be defined in terms of the average job description; rather, it encompasses a vast array or responsibilities and priorities, many of which can change from day to day. Across organizations and industries, CEOs oversee different types of businesses, but according to various studies, top dogs allocate their time in similar ways.
Here are seven findings on how CEOs spend their time.
1. According to a 2015 CEO.com and DOMO survey of 256 CEOs across all industries, CEOs work an average of 57.8 hours per week and 10 to 11 hours per day. In comparison, the average employed American business professional reported working 47.5 hours a week, according to the report.
2. CEOs don't often hit snooze. According to the survey, 80 percent said they wake up at 6 a.m. or earlier and only 3 percent sleep past 8 a.m. More than 66 percent of CEOs go to bed at 11 p.m. or later, and the average CEO gets 6.7 hours of sleep per night.
3. The average CEO reports spending about 2.5 hours per day in meetings, with most taking place with other executives.
4. According to Andrea Prat, PhD, a professor of economics at Columbia Business School in New York City, the majority of CEOs' meetings involve people inside the company. And while meetings are often connotative of time wasters, Dr. Prat discovered the opposite in his research, according to Marketplace. Instead, the more time a CEO spends in meetings with his or her employees, the better the company performs, according to the report.
3. According to the CEO.com survey, CEOs spend the most time meeting with those in the finance department, followed by operations, client/professional services and sales. They spend the least time meeting with the legal department.
4. Reviewing reports consumes 21.2 percent of the time CEOs spend working alone.
5. After work on weekdays, CEOs spend an average of 2.1 hours per night with family. When asked to name the one thing they wish they could spend more time doing, 25.8 percent of respondents said they wished they could spend more time with family, while 63.7 percent said they wished they could spend more time on a hobby.
6. In an average day, CEOs spend just under an hour working out, 1.4 hours eating meals and about 1.2 hours consuming news, according to the report.
7. On the weekend, CEOs work an average of 2.4 hours on a Saturday and/or Sunday.