Feel like you have an ever-growing pile of things to do and never enough time to get it all done? Here’s how the most successful CEOs deal with that problem: They of course ensure everything that needs to get done will get done, but in terms of their own time and energy—they focus on what only they can do. That’s according to Carolyn Dewar, Scott Keller, and Vikram Malhotra, McKinsey senior partners and authors of the forthcoming book, CEO Excellence: The Six Mindsets That Distinguish the Best Leaders from the Rest (Scribner, March 15, 2022).

Anything that can be delegated, should be delegated. And what’s left, isn’t treated as a marathon (that takes too long) … or a sprint (you burn out). Instead, it’s treated like interval training: Intensely focusing on progress, then ensuring time is taken for recovery, and then back to the intensity. As in athletics, such an approach not only gets the job done, it continually builds strength and resilience. That’s based on more than 20 years’ worth of data on 7,800 CEOs from 3,500 public companies across 70 countries and 24 industries.

See what the authors have to say about how the best CEOs achieve optimal effectiveness in this sixth video of a seven-part series, and stay tuned for more on the #CEOExcellenceBook in the weeks ahead.

“The thing I had to learn was to say no. When someone calls me and says, ‘I want you to be the keynote speaker,’ or, ‘Don’t you want to do this off-site?,’ or ‘Let’s do a dinner,’ saying no feels uncomfortable initially, because people mean it in a friendly way. But to say no politely is important. After that, the key thing is how do I make the hours I’ve said ‘yes’ to be as productive as possible.”

–Flemming Ørnskov, Galderma