(FORTUNE Magazine) – IF ONLY there weren't so many interruptions. Look, now Dexter's gliding down the hall. Bet he'll want to shoot the breeze. Doesn't he know I have a mucho important report due Tuesday? Quick, gotta shut the door before he makes eye contact. Shouldn't have said I'd run the four o'clock meeting. Hey, there's Jack, the consummate opportunist, over at the water cooler, as usual. Always schmoozing, that guy. Never seems to do a lick of work but somehow he keeps getting promoted. Damn, the phone's ringing again. If only I had at least five secretaries. Where did I put the Filofax? . . . Wait a minute. Before you heed that guilty inner voice imploring you to be more disciplined, before you heroically struggle to impose order and seize control of your time, before you splurge on fancy leather-bound organizers and time-management seminars, consider for a moment -- if you have one to spare -- this simple proposition: The received wisdom on how managers should manage their time is logical, morally appealing, and, in practice, for the most part wrong. The standard approach springs from a sort of hyper-rationalist thinking. Much as Louis XIV's architects carved the rambling French landscape into sharp geometric patterns, so do the Time Technicians reshape the terrain of an executive's schedule. Control your time, the T2s exhort. Avoid interruptions. Deploy secretaries and assistants as vigilant ''time protectors'' against would-be ''time robbers'' like those colleagues of yours conspiring to keep you from getting your work done. Plan your schedule days, weeks, even months ahead. Do it now! Set aside big blocks of time for solitary toil and deep strategic cogitation. T2s are the ultimate control freaks, with a faith in planning unseen since the heyday of Marxist-Leninism. The big problem with this kind of thinking is that it has nothing to do with how the majority of effective executives -- CEOs, presidents, general managers -- actually handle their day. Professors and consultants who have bothered to study real-life bosses found that good managers typically prefer to play it as it goes. They keep lots and lots of open, unstructured time, filling their days with brief, unscheduled conversations. Much of this, to the untutored observer, looks like mere gossiping, joking, and schmoozing. By constantly talking with colleagues and customers who call or drop by, top executives stay plugged in. They get up-to-the-minute information and maintain the vital personal ties that enable them to get things done in big organizations. By contrast, the practice of fighting off interruptions and tightly controlling other people's access inevitably cuts you off from what's happening in your company, your industry, and the rest of the flux-filled world. New support for the fluid theory of time management comes from an unpublished study by Stephanie Winston, a New York City-based expert on organizing. Her books Getting Organized (1978) and The Organized Executive (1983) together have sold over one million copies. Winston charges $1,200 a day as a consultant; her clients are mostly business owners, professionals, + and executives at big companies, but not CEO types. So two years ago, to get a sense of how they handle time, Winston interviewed 48 top executives, mainly chairmen, vice chairmen, and presidents of major companies, including John Sculley (Apple), Andrew Grove (Intel), Joseph Vittoria (Avis), John Bryan (Sara Lee), Katherine Graham (Washington Post), and Karen Horn (Bank One Cleveland). What she found surprised her: ''The astonishing fact is that a CEO's days are taken up with little but interruptions,'' says Winston. ''The country's top executives walk into the office in the morning with only a vague sense of what the day will bring. In seeming contradiction of all rules of efficiency and time management, they largely work in response to 'whatever comes next.' '' She found that only two hours of a CEO's nine- to ten-hour working day might consist of prebooked appointments. What Winston came to realize is that being interrupted doesn't detract from the work of top managers; rather, it is their work. ''They use a fluid time style to make abundant connections and draw in streams of information,'' she says. ''The torrent of questions, comments, updates, requests, and expectations is a rich resource to be mined.'' She found that much of the time CEOs' conversations didn't deal with business matters: ''There's a very high schmooze factor. People say, 'Isn't that wasting time?' No, because it provides lubrication and establishes ties.'' JOSEPH VITTORIA, CEO of Avis, headquartered in Garden City, New York, and one of the executives in Winston's study, blocks out two- to three-hour stretches or whole days for unscheduled encounters. ''My business requires a lot of personal contact,'' he says, ''whether it's here in the office or getting on a chartered plane and hitting four or five offices in the field. The door is always open, and people are always stopping by. I like them to have the opportunity to talk about what's on their mind. It's important that everybody has access. All of us have outside appointments and meetings, but when I'm here it becomes access time.'' What useful lessons can the majority of workaday managers, the ones who do have specific tasks to accomplish, and unforgiving deadlines to meet, learn from the time habits of CEOs? ''When people interrupt,'' advises Winston, ''realize that they come carrying gifts -- information, ties of loyalty and mutual well-being. Think of the interweaving of contacts as the other part of your work.'' Okay, maybe you actually have a report to write, unlike the CEO, who only reads them. Winston advises setting aside 60 to 90 minutes of private time during the part of the day when you work best. For most executives, that means first thing in the morning. If necessary, leave your desk and go somewhere else to toil privately -- a quiet conference room, perhaps, or the coffee shop across the street. ''However, for the rest of the day, take a stance to realize the value other people are bringing and how much you can influence them.'' Winston's research builds on two earlier works that remain classics. In his 1973 book, The Nature of Managerial Work, Henry Mintzberg, now a professor at McGill University, concluded that a manager's activities are characterized by ''brevity, variety, and fragmentation.'' Mintzberg studied five CEOs and found that 49% of their daily encounters lasted less than nine minutes, while only 10% lasted longer than an hour. When the CEOs weren't in scheduled meetings, they spent their time on phone calls (average: six minutes each), walks through the office (11 minutes), unscheduled meetings (12 minutes), and intermittent bouts of desk work (15 minutes). The managers gave top priority to ''instant communication'' or ''hot information,'' meaning gossip, speculation, and hearsay. They spent 78% of their time talking with other people. Mintzberg thought this time style forced managers to be superficial, but John Kotter, a professor at Harvard business school, later discovered its hidden virtues. For his 1982 book, The General Managers, Kotter followed around 15 executives judged as good performers by their companies. The GMs spent 76% of their working time talking with others, with private time occurring mainly while they commuted, traveled on planes, or worked at home. Most of their time wasn't planned in advance. They spoke with lots of people, many of whom were outside the chain of command -- a subordinate's subordinate, for example -- or seemingly unimportant outsiders. The GMs' brief conversations went all over the place -- ten unrelated topics might come up in a five-minute chat. Much of the talk was friendly, humorous banter that had nothing to do with work. The GMs asked a lot of questions. They rarely gave direct orders or made big decisions. Nonetheless, they constantly tried to influence people through tactics such as nudging or cajoling. Thus, they spawned networks of hundreds or even thousands of contacts -- a crucial lever for promoting their agendas. Kotter persuasively argued that his GMs illustrated ''the efficiency of seemingly inefficient behavior.'' WHILE for the most part consultant Winston similarly admired the CEOs she interviewed, she did see some potentially serious problems with how they managed their time. For one thing, many of the bosses didn't read much, aside from their company's internal reports and some business journalism. And certain CEOs spent most of their time talking with only a few close, high- level colleagues, a dramatic shrinkage from the network of hundreds of contacts maintained by the general managers Kotter studied. Why? One possibility: The network is a means to an end. If the executive's goals are limited to career advancement, the end is largely achieved when he becomes CEO, and henceforth he is tempted to sequester himself from the irreverent hordes. Kotter says that refusing to become insulated separates the CEOs who are real leaders from those who are just managers. ''When you get to the corner office,'' he observes, ''the manager's mind-set says, I need to talk to five or ten people but not all the other crazies who come to see me. The leaders see the world as constituencies that can give them support. They are likely to talk to the masses.'' Think of Sam Walton barnstorming the Southeast to visit his stores, or Millard S. Drexler, president of the Gap, answering his own phone and taking dozens of calls a week from customers. Unfortunately, some of the supposed experts keep advising executives to cut themselves off. For example, a recent McKinsey & Co. study, Leveraging CEO Time, argues, ''CEOs often spend too much time gathering information . . . and too little time making decisions.'' The report recommends explicitly assigning secretaries and assistants as ''time protectors.'' The idea is to shield the CEO ''from unscheduled telephone calls and visits according to a prearranged screen of who should and who should not have direct access.'' The McKinsey team recommends blocking out at least two ''CEO time alone'' sessions a week, each for two hours. Really now? Granted, executives need a certain amount of time for reflection, but it's silly to shut in the poor guy during normal business hours, when people want and need to see him. Better to ponder life's mysteries during the quieter hours at the beginning or end of the day, or on weekends, or while traveling. Once the time protectors have dug a moat around the corner office, what is the lonesome king to do? McKinsey advocates parceling out his time for various roles over a 12-month period. For example, block out 900 hours for strategic development. Yes, they say, put it on the calendar now. Just imagine the challenge entailed in coming back from a nice lunch to find the following schedule entry: ''3:00 to 6:00. Strategize.'' In reality, effective executives are thinking strategically virtually all the time. In a given week they might have dozens of conversations that in some way touch on strategic issues. Kotter says that skillful managers see routine meetings as opportunities for ''flushing out the vision. They'll find some way in the normal unfolding of events to get in conversations that look to the long term.'' Kotter describes, for example, how Lou Gerstner moved into his new job as head of American Express Travel Related Services: He kept asking good questions and thus turned meetings from sleepy, rehearsed dog-and-pony shows into forums for communication and strategic thinking. More recently Gerstner brought the same mind-set, and some of the same techniques, to his new job as CEO of RJR Nabisco. WHEN the Time Technicians can't erect a shield against interruptions -- arghh, they've laid off all the secretaries -- their next defensive strategy is containment, i.e., keeping the interruptions really brief. Franklin International Institute is a Salt Lake City company that sells day- planner books and time-management courses. Franklin recommends dealing with interruptions (which it pins as the No. 1 ''time robber'') by asking a supposedly ''nonthreatening'' yet pointed question that brings out the business issue at hand without letting the encounter turn into a social call. Example: ''What is it you need?'' This doesn't necessarily seem like the best way to build a supportive, trust-filled workplace. Okay, so you promise not to give the evil eye to the poor supplicant at your door. But how can you be Mr. Nice Guy while still making sure to finish all the paperwork, report writing, and budget projections bequeathed to you by colleagues whose jobs have been restructured out of existence? Maryanne Ebert, president of the Priority Associates consulting firm in Long Lake, Minnesota, suggests figuring out how much time it would take you to do your private work if you were left completely alone. Then, make sure to set aside that baseline - time period plus a generous buffer for interruptions -- at least 25% more time, probably closer to 50%. If you come up with 50 hours of alone-time work, you're obviously going to have to rethink priorities and decide which of it you can delegate or eliminate completely. A liberal open-door policy that encourages interruptions actually saves time in surprising ways. ''Someone can say to me in 30 seconds what it might take 15 minutes to write in a memo -- and it generates the ability to think on your feet,'' says Suzanne Rinfret Moore, who oversees three companies while raising a 12-year-old. She is president of Rinfret Associates, an economics consultancy, and Rinfret Securities, a trading operation, and co-head of Alterna-track, a firm that finds part-time and project work for Wall Street professionals. ''We keep in constant communication at our organization,'' she says. ''When you're confronting a lot of different issues on a daily basis, you have to be flexible. You can't get wedded to any particular game plan because life in business is dynamic and you have to go with the flow. At any given moment I could have a client making demands on my time that would preclude or preempt an internal meeting. When most of the business day is fluid, it fosters creativity for yourself and the people you work with. Access is critical. I want people who can come to my door. They're not time bandits.'' Moore says that professional women with young children are learning to use time better by moving some of their work out of the office and into the home. She takes calls from clients there at times such as 7 A.M. and 10 P.M. Her son, Justin, knows that when the University of Michigan consumer confidence survey rolls off their home fax on Thursday nights, mom is going to be busy telephoning her associates. Of the various schemes for stretching time, getting up early -- really early -- seems most popular in the managerial class. Many CEOs make it to their desks by 7 or 7:30 A.M. Cosmetics tycoon Mary Kay Ash has long made a habit of rising at 5 A.M. six times a week, figuring the extra work hours give her the equivalent of a nine-day week. She encourages her colleagues to join what she calls her ''five o'clock club.'' She says that when she asks an audience of prospective managers how many would like to join, there's always a big show of hands. The volunteers had better be serious about it, because what membership means is that one fine morning the phone is going to ring at around 5:30. And you were holding that for private time.