Often in the world of calendar management, things can seem well. . . additive. Another quick meeting? Sure, let me hold time. You need a deliverable for the board meeting? Okay, I’ll get that in too. Plus meetings, of course, and prep for those meetings and follow up from those meetings and ARE YOU TIRED YET? Me too.
I recently met with a senior school district leader, and rather than add things to her calendar, we looked for areas to Loosen. I’m not talking wholesale chopping of entire meetings because that is how a lot of our work gets done, but I’m focused on those times when you see weeks of wall-to-wall meetings. It can simply feel and be exhausting. I’m here to encourage you to think about how you can Loosen the calendar to get a little bit of time back. Below I’ll share a few creative ideas we have practiced, observed in our travels, and openly sourced from our friends and fans.
- Create Bye Weeks. You know how sports teams occasionally have weekends off from play. Well, how about we try that too? Maybe every fourth or eight week is a Bye Week, and all internal meetings are cancelled and replaced with office hours. You could figure out which increment worked for your team. One team we saw simply took any naturally occurring 4-day week and turned it to a Bye Week so people didn’t cram 5 days of work into 4!
- No-Meeting Wednesdays. Asana and lots of other tech companies do this on a weekly basis to free people up to focus on priorities or do deeper work. This could be aligned with remote days or combined with ensuring there is a quiet place to do the work. A team at a large public entity says, “As we were thinking about the gap between our vision for strong performance management and our reality, we recognized that lots of choppy meeting days interfered with our ability to get long, uninterrupted work blocks for data analysis, strategy pivots, long-term planning, etc.” No-Meeting Wednesdays helped them get some time back.
- Place a Recurring Block on Your Team’s Calendar. My high school friend and tech leader, Alan, mentioned that he places a four-hour hold on his team’s calendars for Fridays – preventing them from getting pulled into organizational meetings. Leaders, take note!
- A Monthly Quiet Friday. This idea came from Alison over at Chiefs for Change. She said, “The first Friday of every month is Quiet Friday, meaning no internal meetings take place. I use it as an opportunity to map out the month ahead and catch up on lingering work.”
- Shorten Those Meetings. Alan references Google’s Speedy Meetings setting that shortens meetings (ending 5 minutes early from a 30 minute meeting and so on), and allows people to prepare or have a bio break before the next meeting.
- Create a Focused Morning Hour. A nonprofit team member describes people having time to productively work before meetings begin. Alyssa says, “My team works remotely across three separate time zones, but we all operate on East Coast hours. In light of this, our morning focus time is partially intended to accommodate everyone’s body clock (or as my team joked earlier this week, “don’t talk to me before my coffee”). During this time, I use the first hour or two of the day to catch up on any unfinished work from the previous day and prepare for the day ahead. I’ve found it really helpful and motivating to start my day with small “wins” rather than jumping straight into a busy schedule. Also, avoiding small talk at 8am is a nice bonus!”
As we head into the new calendar year, it’s a great moment to look for calendar areas to Loosen. Whatcha got?
