The CIO calendar doesn't follow the 9-to-5 rule. It follows business priorities.
In a role shaped by global teams, nonstop notifications and unexpected crises, the CIO's workday rarely fits inside neat boundaries. Start times shift, evenings fill up with overseas meetings and personal time competes with urgent requests. To understand how CIOs structure their days, we asked several IT leaders a set of questions about their work schedules and how they manage their time. Their answers reveal long hours, deliberate scheduling and a common reliance on trusted executive assistants (EAs) to protect their priorities from competing demands.
Here's what they had to say.
Editor's note:The following responses were edited for length and clarity.
What time does your workday start and end?
"I normally start between 7 a.m. and 7:30 a.m. It's interesting to think about the start and end, because everything blurs together nowadays in this connected world. I'm constantly checking in with the devices and notifications that we have going on. My day typically ends between 6:30 p.m. and 10 p.m. I'm the executive sponsor for our India site, and if there are discussions or leadership meetings scheduled for the India site, they typically take place in the evening.
I love that there's flexibility, allowing me to step out and go for a walk in the middle of the day to blow off some steam -- perhaps during the lunch hour -- while still having the ability to check in or take a call."
"I've learned painfully through experience that you need a start time for each day, because it's not the same for each day. There'll be days when we have a 7 a.m. meeting. On that day, I might decide to work from home, so I get an extra hour.
If you let yourself get dragged around by everyone else's priorities, all you'll have time for between workdays is sleep.
Graeme ThompsonCIO of Informatica
Typically, our meetings start at 8 a.m. or 8:30 a.m. Three or four days out of five, my start time is 8 a.m., and my finish time is 6 p.m. However, that's because I plan it intentionally. There'll be a few days each month where we do calls for India, which we try to do at night to be respectful of their time.
However, if there's no security emergency going on, you can usually manage your day if you're intentional about it and you're lucky enough to have a great assistant who knows what your preferences are and doesn't schedule 15 back-to-back meetings in a day. However, you must pay attention to it. If you let yourself get dragged around by everyone else's priorities, all you'll have time for between workdays is sleep."
"My workday starts at 4 a.m., and then I'll work until about lunchtime in Melbourne, which is the evening in the U.S. Then, my Australia workload kicks in, and they want me to do things locally in Australia. Finally, India comes online around 4 p.m., and I'm doing meetings with them from about 4 p.m. to 7 p.m.
When I'm traveling and meeting with other CIOs, my day looks different. Every night, while I'm away, I'm with a vendor or company. The marketing people are in town, so my day starts around 7 a.m. Sometimes I have town halls starting at 7 a.m., so I might get in an hour earlier. My typical day on the road is 6 a.m. to 6 p.m., followed by dinner with a vendor. Then I get home at 10 p.m. I haven't got any time to go to the gym, and my only personal time is before I go to sleep.
I typically work Monday through Saturday. I work on Saturday in Australia, because that's the same day as Friday in the U.S."
-- Joe Locandro, CIO of Rimini Street
How do you manage your time?
"I have a great EA who helps with this. He is incredible, and he does a great job of just being the front-line protector of my time. He schedules my calendar, and I just take his lead. We check in with each other a couple of times a week, and we're always on Slack -- so he's very familiar with what is a priority for me.
My priorities include customer-related and executive-related items, followed by a list that narrows down to major company priorities and operational excellence items, such as escalations."
"It's a challenge in a job like this, because there are always urgent things that you can't plan for, such as the CrowdStrike outage. However, I'm fortunate enough to have an awesome assistant. We work together each week to ensure that my time is balanced between one-on-ones, meetings with my leaders and skip-level meetings with people on my team.
We also make sure that I spend enough time on project and portfolio management. We have a couple of these meetings each week, regardless of the circumstances. Those meetings do not move.
Additionally, I set aside time each week for sales. For example, when the salesperson calls and says, 'I need your help with a customer. When are you available?', it's not like I make them wait three weeks. Instead, I've got three hours blocked on Thursday afternoon just for this purpose.
Effective time management as a CIO is about being intentional and figuring out what your priorities are, where you want to spend your time and organizing your calendar accordingly. It also involves being prepared for the unexpected events that may arise."
"Schedule discipline and carving out time for yourself is very hard in a global role. It's critical to have a very good EA who tries to manage the schedule -- and you've got to be brutal. Every time someone puts a diary entry without going through my EA, I write back and reject the meeting, saying, 'No, you must go through my EA.' After a month of rejecting their entries, they learn to go through my EA.
I've had to train people at every job in every country. People try to bypass the EA by getting your mobile phone. When I started living overseas, I never published my mobile phone number on my business cards. I just had my office and EA phone number on it, so it would never get on any Salesforce or contact lists, and no one could bypass my EA."
-- Joe Locandro, CIO of Rimini Street
Tim Murphy is site editor for Informa TechTarget's IT Strategy group.
