The Power of Empty Space: Why a Full Calendar Saps your Strength

Is your calendar busier than Taylor Swift after a breakup? Does opening your work calendar fill you with angst and revulsion reminiscent of checking the backside of a spider-squashing implement? Let's delve into why our primary organization tool can feel so unnervingly chaotic and explore effective strategies to reclaim our most valuable resource: time. By understanding the root causes of calendar overload and implementing practical time management techniques, we can transform our schedules from sources of stress to instruments of productivity and peace.

Why do we do this to ourselves?

No one sets out to fill up their calendar. An overly full work calendar is an inevitable outcome for busy professionals who don't vigilantly guard against it. There are 2 main reasons we let this happen to ourselves.

1. Allowing our calendars to fill up is easier than saying "no" to a calendar invitation.
2. Sometimes, people subconsciously want a full calendar. A full calendar is a visual representation of how busy you are, which is almost a badge of honor at many organizations. A full calendar also means you know how your day will be spent. It's a defense mechanism against people who want to take up your time because you literally have no more to give. Of course, that doesn't make any logical sense; we're setting ourselves up for an awful day to stop other people from ruining our day, but… the subconscious works in mysterious ways!

The Hidden Costs of a Full Calendar

A horde of people are trying to wage war on our free time. You've got salespeople, advertisers, the coworker who always asks questions when the meeting is about to end, your dog asking to go out for the 17th time, and the most insidious of all: that incessant Duolingo owl.

The point is that life is going to happen. Having every minute of your work day accounted for in meetings and focus blocks might sound super productive, but that's not how it will play out in practice. Fires will come up at work, your pets or children will interfere and your energy levels may be different than you had planned. Holding time open on your calendar for things to come up at work and in life is a critical skill that many otherwise successful professionals are terrible at.

A jam packed calendar isn’t just making you less productive (although it probably is); it adds to your stress levels. Leaving no room for contingencies guarantees that you'll be doing even more context-shifting during the day, and numerous studies show that context-shifting causes stress, anxiety, and burnout.

Whether your full calendar has burgeoned because your organization incentivizes people to appear busy or because everyone just subconsciously ends up doing it, the problems created are significant. Everyone having a full calendar makes single-touch communication impossible. Before even addressing an important issue at work with a group of people who have full calendars, you first must ask everyone what you can and can't book over so you don't have to reschedule the meeting multiple times.

This creates a situation where the more high-level people you need in a conversation, the further out you have to book that meeting. At many organizations the more important a topic is, the harder it is to schedule time to talk about it… not a great system when you think about it!

You may not even know the extent of the problems your already-full calendar is creating. How many prospects have opened your calendar link and not booked because the first available meeting time was too far away? How many times has one of your direct reports gone to throw time on your calendar because they needed you but then saw how busy you look and decided to suffer through a problem you could easily have solved for them?

Solutions

Most people want to feel in control of their work day and avoid having meeting requests thrown on their calendars at the last minute. Here are some strategies that get that done without all the collateral damage.

Closely Manage your Calendar Links

Calendar links are awesome. Scheduling meetings used to be a pain, but with calendar links, now it isn't. But I think we got so addicted to the convenience of calendar links that we have come to share our calendar links a little more freely than we should. Many meetings created through calendar links have little to no context, and one or both parties arrive entirely unprepared. People also often allow meetings to be booked back to back and don't limit the number of bookable meetings per day. This inevitably leads to meeting marathons where it's impossible to bring their best energy or accomplish the tasks arising from a meeting before the next one begins. To solve all of this, we recommend leveraging the following techniques that almost all calendar apps allow but are underutilized:

1. Make different meeting types instead of using the generic 30 or 60-minute links. For example, a salesperson should have different links for demo calls and follow-up meetings. This will allow you to create different rules for each and add some required questions to provide context for the meeting. Remember, you might know the reason for your first meeting when you initially provided your calendar link, but you will only know the context before future meetings if you prompt the meeting requestor to share it.
2. Set most of your calendar booking links to expire. Your calendar link is the key to your time, your most precious and non-renewable resource. We aren't going to live forever. Neither should the calendar link for the 90-day project you're working on.
3. Set a reasonable daily limit for each meeting type and have a reasonable maximum among all your meeting links For example, if you want to allocate 2 hours a day for meetings, you could allow two 15-minute bookings, two 30-minute bookings, and one 60-minute booking. Naturally, for some jobs, a much more significant chunk of a person's day will be spent on meetings, but everyone should set limits. As a project manager in a previous role, I routinely spent 6-8 hours daily in meetings. That said, even the busiest  customer facing people should keep at least 10% of their time set aside for contingencies.
4. Set buffers between meetings. The only thing worse than being late is being unprepared. When we allow important meetings to happen back to back, we tend to be both late and unprepared. Having a buffer before or after each meeting will also enable you to ensure your notes get saved in the right place, your action items are documented, and you can close the loop on any additional communications needed.
5. Consider setting blocks of time for specific types of meetings. This approach acknowledges that certain types of meetings might be more effective when scheduled at a particular time of day. For example, my demo link, which I use to meet with prospective customers, only offers meeting times during the time of day when my energy levels are highest so I can be fully engaged (we'll be sharing more about mapping your energy levels soon).

Sell your last hour dearly.

You need a certain amount of time each day to perform the core functions of your job. People get burned out when they spend 8 hours a day in meetings and have zero hours to move forward with the actionable items discussed in all those meetings. When are they supposed to actually do the work their job requires?

If you let your day fully book up, you are creating a situation where you must either work after hours to catch up or multitask during your meetings to get work done. Many of us end up doing a lot of both. This completely defeats the purpose of attending a meeting when all participants are going to be staring at their emails the entire time.

If you feel like you have to multitask during meetings to keep up, then you should probably attend fewer meetings—it's that simple. Showing up to meetings where everyone is giving 25% of their focus to the discussion and 75% to answering emails is a waste of your collective time, not to mention that kind of multitasking is inherently stressful.

Label What Can be Booked Over

People want to avoid double-booking you. They are just trying to meet as soon as possible to solve the problems that they care about. If your calendar has clear options for them to book something reasonably soon, they will likely take them. Suppose your calendar doesn't have open time or clear options for scheduling. In that case, you'll find that people will make an educated guess on what can and cannot be booked over. Then, you will get annoyed when their educated guess doesn't match your work reality, and they've booked over the things you really care about. Labeling your more flexible meetings or time blocks is also a defensive strategy. Clearly identifying what blocks of time can be booked over also carries the clear implication that the rest cannot be.

Build a Culture of Respecting Time

The only way to stop people from defensively blocking their calendars is to prevent people from booking offensive meetings. At Remotivated, we do not subscribe to the "all meetings are bad" narrative. We do however, believe that many well-intentioned meetings end up being a waste of time. To avoid this, it's critical that everyone in the organization understands what is worthy of a meeting, what information is required when booking a meeting, and what the urgency level is.

That means before booking meeting time, everyone should consider the following:

1. Why do I want this meeting? Could we have this discussion asynchronously? If we could hold the discussion asynchronously, would it take too long or be less ideal for some reason? Is the outcome I'm looking for worth the cost of having X people spend Y minutes on a call?
2. What are the inputs and outputs for this call? Inputs like an agenda, documentation, or items that provide context should be delivered with the original meeting invitation. Outputs could be notes, a recording, or a list of action items.
3. What is the level of urgency for each of my participants and the organization? Everyone must think through that specific lens because a meeting that may feel super urgent to you may not be for the other parties involved or for the company. Getting people on a call ASAP to discuss fixing a problem you are passionate about may feel critical to you. However, remember that you may be pulling them away from something more important to them or the organization as a whole.
4. Finally, keep in mind the rule above regarding the last hour. Suppose you are booking a meeting on my empty calendar 3 weeks from now. In that case, I will be less discerning than if you ask to book my last free block of time during the day tomorrow. If I get an invite for my last free block of time during the day, the context sent with the meeting invitation should be something like, "Our application is down, and the customers are rioting. SEND HELP 🔥 🚒."

Practice Saying "No"

A meeting invitation is an invitation, not an obligation. Most people feel very uncomfortable declining unless they have another meeting on their calendar they can point to, but this is the cause of all the problems we've gone over in this post. To escape that, we need to be comfortable declining invites that don't work for us. Weigh the same 4 categories above and decide if those boxes have been checked. If not, consider declining or asking for more context. Remember that there will be cases where a meeting may be missing one thing (like an agenda) but is so urgent that it's worth doing anyway.

One last thing on this point—make sure you are actually saying no. Sometimes, it is tempting to not respond to a meeting invitation and not show up to avoid conflict. This is so much worse than politely declining or offering to help in other ways asynchronously!

Bend, don't break

There will be times when your day's demands do not fit into all the nice little checkboxes we've just created. That's okay. There will be days when we dash from meeting to meeting and just have to wing it, but those types of days should be the exception, not the norm.

When you find your calendar trending in the wrong direction, take steps to reclaim some time by pushing off your least important calls (if possible) or blocking off some time the next day to catch up.

The important thing is to move in the right direction to allow yourself the space to actually do your job. Don't beat yourself up when you have crazy days, and don't feel guilty when you have quiet ones. If you build a thoughtful process around managing your time, it will work out.

Join the Battle Against Time Wasting

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