Calendar Bankruptcy
Want to claw back precious minutes of every day so you can spend them doing things you actually care about? You need to blow up your calendar.
I want to be really honest with you.
For many years I was addicted to being ‘busy’. I had to be doing something, all of the time. Every minute of every day. I ran from meeting to meeting, filled my calendar with appointments from morning to night, weekday to weeknight. For me, a sign of success was a full schedule. It made me feel wanted, needed, important and - or so I thought - fulfilled.
It’s taken me many years to realise that a full work calendar is the opposite of success. It’s actually a sign of the failure to define your boundaries, and to fight hard enough to protect some of your time for yourself.
Put your hand up if you’re addicted to always being ‘busy’? Ok, ok. So I can’t quite see how many of you have raised your hand from your keyboard or your mobile phone, but I already know that it’s a lot.
Meetings are the scourge of modern workplaces, slowly invading our diaries until you arrive at the stage where you scan the day ahead in your diary and let out a long, internal sigh. And if you’re not careful, they can take over your life.
We spend way too much of our work day in meetings. One survey of 1900 business leaders found that workers in large organisations of 500 or more employees spend around 75 per cent of their time preparing, attending, leading and concluding meetings. 75 freaking per cent! No wonder it feels like we spend our time in meetings talking about all the work we have to do, without getting any actual time to do all the work we keep meeting about.
Our brains were not designed to attend back-to-back meetings for hours on end. In a revealing research study I found while researching Work Backwards, Microsoft’s Human Factors Lab strapped EEG monitors onto 14 people to track the electrical activity in their brains as they sat through video meetings. They observed what happened when four half-hour meetings were held back-to-back – not uncommon in a typical corporate day – and discovered that the average beta wave activity increased with each meeting, suggesting a build-up of stress. For participants who took ten minutes between each meeting to calm down – in this study they meditated – their average beta wave activity remained largely ‘cool’ and steady over time.
You’d be hard pressed to find anyone who says they really love meetings, and this is because we have too many of them, and because we’re doing them wrong. They might go on for too long, have too many people in them, not be relevant to all attendees, be unstructured, or have no clear outcome at the end. If any of that sounds familiar, then learning how to be better at meetings is one of the tools you can use to forge a better work life. Think of all the hours you’ll claw back to spend on other things if you can get meetings under control.
The tyranny of meetings has been compounded by the rise of video conferencing, which means you can now sit in the comfort of your own home and stare at a bright green light for hours on end. The more we work from home, the more meetings we are having. In the first few months after professional workers retreated to their homes during Covid, the number of virtual meetings skyrocketed so much that by the end of 2020, they had doubled. That growth continued, and two years later there were 250 per cent more meetings in our diaries than before the pandemic.
That’s why this month’s Useful Thing is how to claw back some of your life from meetings.
One Useful Thing for May 2024: Calendar Bankruptcy
At the start of 2023, e-commerce company Shopify did something pretty unusual. Their IT department logged into the diaries of their 10,000 employees around the world and cancelled every recurring meeting that had three or more people. The aim was to reset collectively as a business and free up more time to do work and spend less time in meeting rooms.
A few months later, the results showed that employees were spending an average of 33% less time in meetings year over year, and saw around 25% more projects being able to be completed by engineering, product and user experience teams compared to the previous year.
Like any addict, sometimes the best solution is to give in and go ‘cold turkey’ on your busyness. You can do this by declaring ‘calendar bankruptcy’, which is a simple way to clear out all the existing meetings in your diary so you can start back fresh and consciously.
How to use this:
Go into your calendar and take a photo or screenshot of your upcoming weeks or months, so that you still have a record of it somewhere if you ever need to refer to it.
Tell everyone around you that you’re officially declaring calendar bankruptcy. This could include your work colleagues, partner, friends and anyone else who is in your diary on an ongoing basis.
Then go into every single reoccurring appointment you have in your diary and delete them. Yep, blow them all up. The aim here is to start with a clean slate so you can think carefully before adding regular events back in.
Once your schedule is completely cleared out, you can start adding things back, consciously, one at a time. But before you put a new meeting in your diary, ask yourself IFF it really needs to go back in. IFF stands for:
• Intention: Is this meeting necessary?
• Format: Is this the right format?
• Frequency: Does it need to happen this often?
From then on, only put things in your diary if they are absolutely necessary.
Approach new meetings consciously. Think of a meeting as having three parts: before, during and after. At each of these stages you should be extremely clear with everyone around you about what is required from them.
Before the meeting, ensure there is a clear reason it’s being held and that all attendees are aware of it. You don’t need to circulate a formally written document, but even putting a quick description in the calendar invite laying out the aim and a rough outline of the meeting process will help.
During the meeting, try to stick to an agenda to keep it on track. The aim of this is not to create additional paperwork or bureaucracy, it’s to value everyone who has given up their time to attend. You should never leave a meeting without asking three simple questions: What are the next steps? Who should do them? And by when? If nothing else is accomplished during the meeting, being clear on the outcome will ensure it’s not time wasted.
After the meeting, the organiser, or whoever they appoint, should email attendees the answer to those three questions, for accountability. It’s really that simple.
If declaring calendar bankruptcy seems too extreme or impractical for you, another good solution is to implement an entire day of the week where no meetings can take place. Anyone in a team can suggest this, from a junior employee to the CEO, and you can always begin with just your department to test how successful it is. If implemented correctly, having one meeting-free day a week leaves an entire day that can be spent on deep thinking, problem-solving, strategising and higher-level work that requires few distractions.
Every minute you can claw back from your work day is a minute that you can put to better use. Learning how to do better meetings is just one of the tools you can use to work smarter, and we all should be taking advantage of this moment in our work history to do that.
A warm welcome to all of the new readers to OUTLET who have arrived here after downloading the worksheets from Work Backwards, or discovered this newsletter through my recent editorial in the Sydney Morning Herald and The Age.
The aim of this monthly email is to give you tools to claim back some of your life from work, even if it’s just a half hour each week that you can use for other things. I hope you find it as useful as I do compiling it each month.
I’m now very happily back in Mallorca after almost two months in Australia and Asia launching my new book. It was such a pleasure to tour the country, meet so many people and wear myself out with media and podcast interviews. Thank you to everyone who has read it so far. If you have - and you enjoyed it - I have just one small favour to ask: can you please leave a review on Amazon or Goodreads? These things still matter and help us spread the message even further. Muchas gracias!
Until next month,
Tim
If I could like this more than once, I would! I feel the same.
I’ve been banging on about “banning busy” for nearly a decade so this post made me cheer!