What would you do with the hoursyou spend arranging meetings?

Exec Assistants are the backbone of any organisation; one of their key responsibilities is coordinating and connecting leadership with the rest of the organisation, whilst juggling their personal and customer-facing commitments on-demand. Always a tricky task given the sheer number of meetings and stakeholders to manoeuvre.

I have always been amazed by how they are able to manage and coordinate at scale, especially those that are supporting multiple leadership stakeholders at once.

If you’re an EA, you already know where the week goes. Someone needs 30 minutes with your executive, someone else wants to move Thursday, and the board needs a date before Friday. Each one takes a few messages. Together they fill most of the day.

Below: how big that job really is, a simple grid for sorting it, and how to hand the back-and-forth to a booking page or a poll. There’s a calculator at the end for your own numbers.

Because it lands on the EA by default. Prialto’s 2025 Executive Productivity Report asked executives what their assistants handle, and scheduling came top, at 79%. Travel came second and inbox management third.

Assistants feel the job growing too. The Global Skills Matrix 2026, a survey of more than 3,000 administrative professionals in 69 countries, found:

“59% of administrative professionals report that their responsibilities have expanded significantly since 2021.”

The US Bureau of Labor Statistics adds that “many executive secretaries and executive administrative assistants support more than one manager in an organization.” Two or three executives means two or three sets of preferences, all kept in your head.

This goes to show just how much more complicated life is for the modern EA. Despite all those extra responsibilities, coordinating meetings and juggling calendars is still the task at the top of the list.

Sources: Prialto, Executive Productivity Report, 2025 · Global Skills Matrix, 2026 · US Bureau of Labor Statistics, 2026

Mostly, the work you were hired for. The American Society of Administrative Professionals’ 2026 State of the Administrative Profession found:

“Nearly 40% of admins report zero strategic Partnering or Leading stage responsibilities, despite qualifications that support higher-level work.”

Your executive feels it too. In the same Prialto report, a survey of 508 executives, “Over 50% of executives spend 30% or more of their day on busywork.” When you’re both stuck in logistics, nobody’s doing the planning, the prep or the follow-through.

You can’t win that time back until you can see it. So start by sorting the week.

What strikes me most is the waste on both sides of the desk. You’ve got an executive buried in busywork and an EA with the skills to take a real share of it, and both of them are stuck finding a free hour on Thursday.

Sources: ASAP, State of the Administrative Profession, 2026 · Prialto, Executive Productivity Report, 2025

The Chartered Management Institute’s urgent-important grid sorts every task by two questions. Is it important? Is it urgent? Its template labels the four boxes Do, Schedule, Delegate and Limit, and says important but not urgent “is where you want to spend more of your time”. Pick a box to see it from an EA’s desk.

Whose account does the booking page sit on?

Your executive’s. They connect their calendar and own the page, and you set it up with them: the meeting types, the hours, the buffers. Time OS doesn’t book on someone else’s behalf today, so agree the rules together once. Group polls you can run from your own account.

When I look at an EA’s week through this grid, the Delegate box is the one that fills up fastest. In my view, it’s also where a few rules set once give back the most time. Get that box under control, and the Schedule box finally gets a look in.

Source: CMI, Urgent-important grid (template)

Put in your own week. The numbers below are examples, so change them to match yours. You’ll see the time you spend agreeing meetings today, and what’s left if some of them move to booking pages and polls.

Where do you start?

1. 1.List one week’s meeting requests. Mark the ones you agreed by message, and roughly how many messages each took.
2. 2.Move the recurring ones first. 1:1s, catch-ups and intro calls are the easiest to put on a booking page.
3. 3.Agree the rules once. Sit down with your executive and set meeting hours, buffers and limits together, so the page books the way they’d want.

Even with modest numbers, the hours add up quickly over a quarter. That’s time an EA can put straight back into the work their executive hired them for.