Bill CanadyCEO & Founder, The 80/20 Institute · Be a Great CEO: Learn how to Fix it, Grow it, & Sell it.

Stop Calendar Chaos: Master the 70/30 Rule! #shorts

27 Aug 2026 · 1 min

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In this YouTube short, Bill Canady delivers concise time‑management advice for executives. He introduces the 70/30 scheduling rule: allocate roughly 70 % of a typical executive week to pre‑planned commitments and leave the remaining 30 % unscheduled to absorb unexpected work. He urges viewers to audit their calendars over a two‑week period, calculate the percentage of hours booked in advance, and adjust if they are at or near 95 % occupancy. A calendar booked at 95 % leaves no capacity, causing any unplanned task to displace existing items—most notably the “cadence,” the only activity that can be shifted without complaint. The core message is that maintaining the 70 % line preserves rhythm and flexibility, whereas overbooking erodes an executive’s ability to reallocate time, even for the CEO themselves.

Chapters

The rule is this: schedule 70% of a normal executive week. The remaining 30% absorbs the unscheduled work. Hold the line on the 70 and the unscheduled fits. Lose the line and the rhythm breaks with a quarter. So for 2 weeks, pull down your own calendar and measure what percentage of your working hours were committed in advance. If you're at 95% booked, you do not have a busy calendar. You have a calendar with no capacity, and every unplanned thing that arrives is going to displace something that was actually on your plan. Which in practice means it displaces the cadence because the cadence is the only thing on your calendar that doesn't complain when you move it. Same principle as the whole episode. A calendar at 95% booked is fully occupied and 0% available, and an occupied CEO cannot reallocate anything, including himself.