Start clearing your calendar with this easy exercise

Packed calendars are a given in today’s working environments. Even though certain jobs and positions will always have a bigger load, this doesn’t have to be the norm for all of us.

Here’s an exercise that’s helped me and a couple of people around me freeing some time from their extremely busy schedules.

Lean-ify your calendar

For each of the meetings you attend to along the day, put them in one this categories:

1. Needed to participate: you had to give input, clarify questions, present something, etc.
2. Needed the outcome: you mostly cared about what was discussed during the session — what decisions were made, action points, etc.
3. Nothing much: you were there but nothing much affected you.

Do this during one or two weeks after every meeting. This last part is important, because the longer the wait the blurrier it’ll get and the easier we’ll fall into the “I’ll be there just in case” trap.

After that time, take a look back and analyze the results.

• Which meetings could you skip and rely on the outcomes? You and your team need to be documenting those in order to be able to do this
• Which meetings could just be an email/[insert preferred way of written communication]?
• Which meetings do you actually need to attend and take an active part?

In most cases, you will have a bunch of meetings you could avoid if they were written summaries. In others, you’ll realize they’re actually useful but maybe the format could be improved into something more asynchronous. And, last but not least, some will be great and useful!