Picture this.
A VP of Enterprise Sales at a global software firm on a $350K salary.
Her calendar is color-coded with 23 hours of back-to-back meetings in just five days.
She opens it up on Sunday night and wonders, “Is this really my job?” Then comes an even harder question, “What could I have built with that time if I owned it?”
She could have spent it building something that actually belonged to her.
A fraction of those hours could have been used to define her consulting offer, or had some real conversations with the people in her network, or even written down the methodology she's been executing in boardrooms for a decade.
The real cost of the time spent in those meetings is that it never got to compound into something of her own.
The math nobody runs
The senior leaders I speak to feel the meeting drain.
They complain about it at dinner, they roll their eyes at the calendar invite, and they vent to their colleagues over coffee.
They rarely stop to calculate what it actually costs them.
Take your salary and divide it by 2,080 (the standard number of working hours in a year). That's your hourly rate. Now multiply this by however many hours you spent in meetings last week.
The number flashing on your screen?
Your company got all of it. You got the calendar event and, if you were lucky, a recording you'll never watch.
The point isn't that meetings are useless.
Some of them do matter, but many don't. It’s those ones that extract the most valuable thing you have that are causing the problem.
What you're worth
This is where the exercise gets interesting.
Think about what a senior professional can do with 23+ uninterrupted hours of focused, intentional work on something they own.
→ A single well-crafted proposal to a prospective client can close a $100K contract.
→ A consistent body of published thought leadership content, built over weeks, can position you as the go-to expert in your field before you ever leave your current role.
→ A clearly defined offer can become the foundation of an advisory business that pays you more than your salary does now, with a fraction of the overhead.
My client needed to understand what her time was worth and start directing some of it toward herself.
Reclaiming your time
You don't have to resign on Monday.
Nor do you need to have it all figured out before you make your move.
What you need is a different relationship with your calendar.
Start by auditing your meetings for one week. For each one, ask three questions:
→ Did this move something forward?
→ Was my presence actually necessary?
→ Could this have been an email, a Slack message, or a five-minute call?
Then take the hours you recover and protect them.
Use them to explore what you'd build if this were your time, how you plan to take the next step.
Write the framework that's been living in your head. Reach out to the three people who could become your first clients. Map out what a premium advisory offer in your space would actually look like.
What would you build with 23 hours that were actually yours?
Melina
Curious? Visit my website here.
113 Cherry St. #92768, Seattle, WA 98104
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