Taming your Online Calendar

 Ah meetings. The bane of all our lives. Some are useful, others...less so. But the perception has always been that they get in the way of doing our real jobs. Yet they are a necessary evil - used well, they allow information to flow between people and allow discussion to happen.

Before I go on, I should point out that no, this is not another article about how to make your meetings run better, how to write a better agenda (you are all creating an agenda for your meetings, aren't you?) and so on. Enough has been written about that already. What I'd like to share today is a calendar hack that I find useful to tame that most annoying and insidious habit to become widespread since we have gone online - back to back online meetings.

Since 2020, when Covid forced us into the most extensive remote working experiment ever, I have noticed a trend throughout industry to book meetings into every slot, one after another. Days like that are exhausting, and people have to disengage after a while to recharge, not to mention "comfort breaks"! The approach is unsustainable, and yet it happens.

So what to do? Let's think back to the pre-Covid in-office days. We used to spend time walking between meeting rooms, visiting the loo, grabbing a coffee and so on. All of this gave us time to think and process the last meeting. In an online world we need to get back to something approaching this. But how?

There is advice online about how to automatically set meetings to be shorter that the standard multiples of 30 minutes. So for example a 30 minute chat is set to 25 minutes, and an hour would be 50 minutes long. Good advice and worth trying, but here's the thing - most people still think in full hours, and accidentally (or otherwise) do not respect the timebox given. You are still talking at 59 minutes, then oops! Straight into the next one. Incidentally, some people start the meeting late to try and fix this; a 50 minute meeting would start at 10 minute past. I have noticed that this confuses most folks so quickly dies off.

So here's the lifehack that seems to work for me. Maybe it will help others.

For every meeting, I add to my calendar a post-meeting block that is 50% of the previous meeting length to allow time to process the previous meeting, take a comfort break and grab a drink ready for the next. So for an hour meeting, I reserve 30 minutes. 15 minutes for a 30 minute meeting. Simple as that.

When I do have to back-to-back meetings, I reserve 50% of the total time as soon as I can.

I call these blocks of time several things - "Keep Free" (often shortened to 'KF'), "TnP" (think about it...), "Post-meeting", "Break", "Focus" etc, but they are all labelled with a simple category - "Nope". As in, 'No, do not let anyone book anything here and hijack this time'. They are sacrosanct unless there is a very good reason to lose them (along the lines of 'the CEO wanting a chat' good reason).

This simple hack has transformed my days and made even the busiest schedule bearable. Why not try it and let me know how it goes?