As the CEO, owner, or senior leader of your company, have you ever asked yourself any of these questions? What happened today? Where did the time go? What did I get done that I wanted to accomplish? Have you recently hired someone who seems to be struggling at getting done what she was hired to do? You hired this person to take some of the load off your shoulders, right? Why is there always a line at her door? Wait…isn’t that the line that was always at my door? Are you sleeping well at night? Are you always stressed out? Have you had health problems recently? When was the last time you took some time off?

About a year ago, two prominent business leaders, A.G. Lafley and Roger L. Martin, collaborated on an article in the Harvard Business Review. It was titled “Leaders Shouldn’t Try to Do it All.” The opening point of the article was that while companies can always expand capacity to meet growing demand, the leaders had only twenty-four hours a day. Their remedy flowed from the ideas of David Ricardo who developed the Theory of Competitive Advantage. This theory proposes that nations should export/sell goods and services for which it has a competitive advantage over its trading partners and buy/import those goods and services for which it has a disadvantage. These authors think that this idea, which is over 200 years old, applies to today’s leaders, especially CEOs and other senior leaders. I think they’re right.

Lafley and Martin’s experience shows that business leaders usually allocate their time by lining up potential tasks according to their perceived importance to strategy and crucial priorities until they run out of time. This thinking is flawed: