Declare calendar bankruptcy
Be explicit about what your time means to you
Hi! I’m Rafael and welcome to my weekly newsletter. Every week I publish a small reflection on what it is confusing in an early stage startup: questions about product, design and decision-making.
It sounded dramatic: From now on, we will remove all of our meetings. Anything that was on your calendar, it's now gone, zip. We’ll build our calendar from scratch again — said my boss over a weekly meeting. Even this meeting — he said — I'm not sure if we will keep, at least in this way.
In the last four months, we technically doubled the team size and with it, the number of meetings. Syncs, check-ins, 1:1s, quick calls, retrospectives and general messy meetings kept growing exponentially.
I lost the initiative over my calendar and my projects: to a large extent, my calendar ran me to the point where if I wasn't careful, I would not even have a bio-break in between meetings. Not to say that it was impossible to schedule important sessions or to have everyone that needed to be in a room in the room — even if it was virtual.
To some degree, it was expected, but it also had a big negative impact on my own work: it made me a machine that reacted to things. Without really noticing, I began slipping behind and doing things because “i felt like I had to” instead of what was really important to get done.
Delete your calendar for good
It sounds dramatic, but it is incredibly helpful: starting from a blank slate allowed me and our team to synchronise back again. Instead of missing each other or having 15 minute super speedy sincs, I’ve made an effort to not only redesign the weekly calendar but what does it mean to take care of my own time.
This weekly cadence resonated with every and within every team: having both the ability to focus and knowing when its the time to collaborate. Turning a calendar into a weapon that helped me to focus on what really mattered.
After, I came up with 5 principles to turn every calendar into a focus machine:
Use your calendar to limit work-in-progress
Batch topics together
Book fewer, longer sessions
Spend time working together instead of reporting
Be explicit about what your team means to you
Use your calendar to limit work-in-progress
if you can't keep track of your most important projects in one week — hell, one afternoon — how important are they? Fitting 3 big projects into your week forces ruthless prioritization. Keeping track of weekly progress for big projects allows me to connect the daily operation work with overarching goals I have.
Adding things to the calendar then is less about “squeezing” or “optimizing” my calendar but rather align tasks with long term goals.
Batch topics together
Meetings tend to have different rythms but often they share the same notes: issues that surface on 1:1s tend to have underlying themes to them and you have to maximise your ability to pick up these signals. One way to amplify them is to actually have similar sessions next to one another.
Having all my 1:1s on tuesday and project planning on thursdays highlight global problems that I need to proactively manage: Is the vision clear? Are we tracking well against the plan? Are we doing the right things? A
Book fewer, longer sessions
Longer sessions allow me to be wrong about a topic. In shorter meetings, the stress of time and natural urge to have a “conclusion” lead to a kind of premature optimization. Longer sessions allow one to be surrounded and to take different stances over an argument or an issue — that might sound counter productive in the short term, but critical on the long run.
Spend time working together
Something magical happens when you walk out of the meeting with something that you build and did not walk into it. Taking a constructive approach — whatever that is for you — forces you to genuinely collaborate. Making things has this magical power of dispelling bullshit with incredible efficiency.
If you go into a meeting knowing what you will get out of it, you should really think if you should not have just done it yourself.
Be explicit about what your time means to you
More importantly, defend your time or your calendar will be used against you. If you don’t declare that your calendar works for you, it will rule you.
This is far from unique: plenty of smarter people tackled this issue and inspired me to write this like Maker's Schedule, Manager's Schedule, How can you find time to design? and the very comprehensive 5 principles for effective remote work: how I spend my time as a solo capitalist.
Thanks for reading 🦾 — and if you found this useful, please send it to a friend or subscribe, it really means a lot to me.
Yours,
Rafa