ExecutiveSomeone running a 50–500 person company

When my diary is full of meetings, I want to know which decisions genuinely need me, so my time goes where only I can act.

Khi lịch của tôi kín các cuộc họp, tôi muốn biết quyết định nào thật sự cần tới mình, để thời gian của tôi đi vào chỗ chỉ mình tôi làm được.

Job context

Who: An executive with 25–35 meetings a week
When: Every Monday morning looking at the week ahead
Trigger: Realising they just approved something four other people could have approved
Situation: Everything routes upward, because upward is safest for whoever routes it
Constraints: Cannot skip meetings until someone has been given the authority

Every decision drifts upward
High
Asking upward is the cheapest way to avoid owning the outcome.
Root cause: Nobody has written down who decides what, up to what limit
Cannot tell which meetings can be dropped
Medium
You only learn by missing one, and the cost of the experiment is asymmetric.
Root cause: The value of attendance only shows through absence
Delegated decisions come back anyway
High
The delegate still checks in, so the authority never actually moved.
Root cause: Delegation is spoken rather than written as a threshold
Important non-urgent work never gets its turn
High
The diary fills with what others are waiting on; what only you are waiting on does not.
Root cause: A meeting invite is the only way to claim diary space
Declining a meeting reads as not caring
Medium
Presence carries more social meaning than work value.
Root cause: There is no way to decline while still signalling support

A solution is not the same thing as a product — a customer can hire a behaviour or a workaround too.

An executive assistant filtering the diary
Service
The most effective solution available, filtering by calendar rather than by decision rights.
A written decision-rights matrix
Product
Exactly the missing thing, and it decays because nobody updates it after three months.
Block time in the calendar
Workaround
Executives claim space for their own work by disguising it as a meeting.
Set numeric approval thresholds
Behaviour
The only way delegation actually sticks, because it needs no interpretation.
Answer in a document instead of a meeting
Behaviour
Trades synchronous time for asynchronous, and requires the whole organisation to trade too.

Learning which meetings are droppable requires dropping one, and the cost of a wrong experiment is asymmetric.
Why existing solutions fail: Calendar tools measure time spent, not decisions made, so there is no data to answer this except by experiment.
Potential opportunity: Recording the decision each meeting produced, so after three months it is visible which never needed this person.
Delegation belongs to nobody: the giver thinks it is done, the receiver is unsure it is real, and no document holds the boundary.
Why existing solutions fail: Delegation is spoken in a conversation and lives nowhere afterwards; every HR system records titles, not decision thresholds.
Potential opportunity: Numeric decision thresholds stored beside the title, readable by the delegate without asking.