Bringing it all together
It’s easy to look at your schedule and feel daunted by the task of cleaning it up. We’d encourage you to experiment and see what really works for you. Happy calendar-culling!
When your schedule shifts gears from busy to back to back, running from meeting to meeting can quickly lead to a sense of overwhelm and chaos. Sometimes it can even feel like there’s no time left in the day to tackle the rest of your workload.
In this cheat sheet, we’ll suggest some simple ideas to help you take a step back and create more space.
Amongst 1:1’s and team standups (both of which take time but are useful for creating alignment and ensuring your team are well supported), it’s likely that a few vaguely mysterious recurring meetings may have snuck into your calendar over time.
Getting into the habit of asking whether you’re actually needed for meetings like this can save a lot of time - as can simply declining them and communicating to the meeting owner that they should pull you in when you’re actually needed to contribute.
If you are the one leading one of these meetings, then it might be time to rethink it. Which brings us on to…
Use this quick checklist as a starting point:
One tip I’ve shared with lots of managers during my career as a People person is setting time aside regularly to review upcoming commitments.
I also encourage managers to schedule their own work and personal priorities first - whether that’s focus time, exercise or the school run. If you squeeze these commitments in as an afterthought, you are more likely to skip them and your colleagues are unlikely to understand how important they are to you.
One thing that worked for me when I managed a large team was clustering 1:1’s over one or two days every fortnight. Whilst this can require a lot of energy, it left me more uninterrupted focus time across the week. It also meant I was better able to understand how the team were doing overall and spot trends quickly.
From Miro boards to Slack channels, most workplaces have a range of different tools to help make asynchronous working easier.
Every organisation has their own meeting culture, with its own quirks. This means it’s highly unlikely that you’ll be alone in having issues with the amount of meetings you’re being roped into.
It’s easy to look at your schedule and feel daunted by the task of cleaning it up. We’d encourage you to experiment and see what really works for you. Happy calendar-culling!
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