A colleague came back from a trip years ago and stopped by my desk. Got five minutes, he said. I said yes, because that is what you say. He wanted to update me on a customer meeting, the kind of check in that usually takes exactly five minutes.
It turned out the customer had been quietly trying to build the same capability themselves, using know how they had picked up from working with us. Five minutes became the rest of the day. The customer relationship, the financial exposure, the strategic response, all of it, worked through in real time, none of it on my calendar that morning.
That is the part nobody tells you about running a company. You are the spider in the web, the one node everyone else routes through, and the actual shape of your week lives in the got five minutes, not the blocks your calendar shows.
It is not just a founder problem, and it is not solvable with better staffing. Harvard Business School tracked twenty seven CEOs around the clock for thirteen weeks, sixty thousand hours of data, every one of them with a full executive assistant managing the schedule. They still spent seventy two percent of their work time in meetings, and of the time nominally alone, fifty nine percent came in blocks under an hour. If a calendar assistant cannot protect a Fortune scale CEO from this, a founder without one has no chance, and does not need one to explain why.
The got five minutes moments are not a distraction from the job either. Research on structural holes, the gap between two people or groups who hold pieces of information neither one has alone, found that the person who sits at that junction sees problems earlier and gets their input weighted more, not less. Being the one everyone comes to is not a side effect of being a founder. It is close to the job description.
Here is the arithmetic that never makes it into any of this. Four or five got five minutes in a day is not four or five small interruptions, it is thirty minutes gone, and stacked across a full day it is three or four hours that never show up as a block anywhere, and that I never counted as work myself, even while I was doing it.
None of this is free. Refocusing after an interruption costs real time, one interruption study puts it at about twenty three minutes to fully return to what you were doing before. I am not going to pretend the interruptions come at no cost. The honest version is that the cost is real, and I pay it anyway, because the alternative is worse, a customer left waiting, a decision that sits stuck for three days instead of getting made in the hallway, a problem that grows quietly until it is too big to fix in an afternoon.
My calendar that day showed two meetings and a light afternoon. What actually happened was a customer relationship nearly unraveling, worked through standing at my colleague’s desk, decided before lunch. The calendar was not wrong about the time. It was wrong about the day.
If your calendar has ever looked emptier than your day felt, that gap is not a filing error. That is where the job actually is.
