Calendar madness and how I’m dealing with it
Few weeks ago I hit a “remarkable” milestone clocking almost 40 hours in meetings. Last week was similarly hectic, with about 30 hours spent in meetings! Thx Google for introducing all these amazing features to Calendar - they make me nervous and hold accountable at the same time!
Of course, typical PM work doesn’t stop there: strategy reviews, metrics analysis, planning, user interviews, and so on. So you have to guard your time, or you’ll risk being swallowed by meetings (like I was last week, haha). And while the last few weeks were quite exceptional, they reminded me that you, and only you, are responsible for protecting your time.
There’s a ton of time and calendar management techniques out there (example, and probably more popular example), but I don’t actually use any of them :D. Instead, I wanted to share some tips and tricks that work for me personally. Hope you find them useful too! Here we go:
15 min meetings are perfectly fine! It looks like there’s a common convention that meetings need to be at least 30 minutes. Often they end early, and if you have several in a row, you end up with multiple 10-15 min gaps - not very productive. Instead, I try to combine shorter 15 min catch ups to free up an hour for focused work.
Observe and preserve. Pay attention to the times of day when you are most productive and protect these precious hours. For me, it’s in the morning. While it's not always possible (hello, catch-ups with Australia!), I do my best to avoid meetings before 11 am.
Schedule casual catch ups toward the end of the week. I’m most productive at the start of the week, so I leave my regular catch-ups for later in the week and reserve some space for the strategic discussions for Monday-Wednesday. While you can’t control every meeting scheduled in your calendar, you can at least make a request!
Say no to more things and leave FOMO at the door! This one sounds obvious, but it's easier said than done, right?
I’m really curious to hear from Dina and all our 200+ readers: what works for you?
Dina’s 2 cents:
Protecting the calendar is a psychological thriller of learning to say “no”, establishing boundaries and really getting rid of FOMO like Yana mentioned. Few things that I do:
1. Blocking lunch time - I don’t accept meetings during lunch time. If I don’t eat and attend a meeting I am distracted thinking about how hangry I am. No one wins.
2. Decline or ignore some meetings. My criteria for that is:
Meetings with no agenda
Meetings where we review or decide something that can be clearly done async
Meetings where I know my contributions and presence are not meaningful
Meetings for the sake of meetings - those recurring ones that we all “should be” doing but no one finds them useful; I am also usually the one proposing to kill these meeting entirely,
I want to call out the practice that I personally find exceptionally helpful. At Wistia we have 2 company-wide “no meetings” time blocks on Wednesdays and Fridays. I was pleasantly surprised that everyone respects them and I didn’t have a meeting request during time blocks since I started a couple of months ago. I feel productive and focused and no longer live with constant anxiety of not having enough time to do deep work.