Starting with the biggest change first, one solution is reducing the number of meetings you have in your diary. An extreme way of doing this is to go cold turkey and declare ‘calendar bankruptcy’. This means deleting every re-occurring meeting that’s currently taking up space in your calendar so you can start all over again, adding each new one back in with clear, conscious intention.
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If that’s too much, you can always work with your colleagues, department or entire company to determine a set time as ‘meeting-free’. It might be a regular afternoon or one day a week when no meetings are allowed to be scheduled.
This easy move can have an immediate effect in freeing time up in your life and giving you space to think deeper and more creatively about solutions to your work.
Another simpler approach is to improve your existing meetings. If a meeting is absolutely necessary, you can avoid some of the usual traps with a few simple rules, like always having an agenda, ensuring there’s an organiser who runs the meeting and documenting what the next steps are at the end.
Lastly, you can get more of your workday back by simply cutting the length of your meetings in half. One of the key culprits here is Parkinson’s Law, a term inspired by British historian Cyril Northcote Parkinson. “It is a commonplace observation that work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion,” he wrote in 1955.
Meetings follow the same rules. If you book a meeting for one hour, you will generally take up all that time. The reverse also holds true, so if you schedule a meeting for 15 or 20 minutes, you’d be surprised at how quickly you can resolve most of the key items in the shortened allocated time.
Meeting hell is a terrible place where you don’t want to be. But by making a few simple changes you can spend less time talking about all the work you need to do, and more time actually doing it.
Tim Duggan’s new book, Work Backwards: The Revolutionary Method to Work Smarter and Live Better, is out now. He writes a regular newsletter at timduggan.substack.com
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