Take back control of your diary

To regain control of your diary you need confident awareness of your own priorities and objectives. Empowered with that clarity, you can make active choices about how best to spend your time.

Look first for pointless and ineffective meetings.

Pointless meetings: A meeting without a purpose is just a waste of everyone’s time. If you don’t know what the meeting is for, look for an agenda or ask the organiser its purpose. Definitely don’t attend a pointless meeting, and if you can, do everyone a favour and push for it to be cancelled.

Ineffective meetings: Though these meetings have a purpose they consistently fail to achieve it. If the meeting purpose doesn’t align with or support your own objectives, politely decline the invite so you can spend the time more wisely. Allay any FOMO you might have by asking for a copy of the meeting notes or minutes.

If the meeting purpose does align with your own objectives, then work with the organiser to help them deliver their intent more effectively.

Key questions to consider are:

• Is a meeting the right way to achieve this?

  If you need synchronous discussion, or the visual and verbal cues of conversation, or if your meeting needs to be more of a shared experience (like a team-building session, or an ideation workshop), then definitely schedule a meeting.

  Alternatively, if asynchronous conversation will work equally well, then jump at the chance to ditch that meeting! Replace it with an email, an IM, a threaded group chat, a collaborative document, a slide deck, or even a video. Whatever channel or format you choose, asynchronous communication gives you more control over your message than you would in a meeting. In fact, if you create your content in advance, you can test how it performs and refine it further before you put it to your full audience.

• Is now the right time to have this meeting?

  Are you and the other attendees prepared for this meeting? Will the information needed – for example, to inform decisions – be ready to share before or at the meeting? Are the people you need to have there available and planning to attend? If the conditions for meeting success aren’t there, save everyone the frustration and push to reschedule. Or, if it’s one of many “cadence” meetings, held at set regular intervals, perhaps you can reduce their frequency slightly without sacrificing momentum?

• Are we equipped to run this meeting well?

  Don’t let meetings go round in circles – reflect on what isn’t working and address it. Is the group struggling to keep to time? Are there enough breaks for people to stay focused? Are some voices dominating and others staying quiet? Are discussions heading down rabbit-holes instead of down the agenda items? Are decisions staying implicit, are actions going uncaptured or unassigned? Are any activities too complicated or confusing? Are people struggling to follow the discussion, or otherwise stay engaged because there’s insufficient variety or interaction? Take the time to design your sessions well – and make sure you have the meeting has a capable chair/facilitator, time-keeper and note-taker on the day.

Good meetings achieve their intended purpose, moving people and work forward. If they’re relevant to you, then an effective meeting will be a time-saver rather than a time-sink.

Meeting overload

It’s possible that, after you’ve taken out the pointless and ineffective meetings, you’ll still have too many meetings in your diary.

Now you need to make some tough decisions.

First – revisit your priorities and commit to the meetings that support them. If you have too many priorities, you have no priorities, so choose to focus your intention and attention on only three or four at a time. The meetings supporting these priorities, they’re the ones you should attend.

Step back and look at your diary. To keep progress at pace towards achieving your priorities, you want to strike the right balance of solo- versus group-based activities (most of which are usually meetings of one sort or another). For many of us, delivering our objectives will require at least some uninterrupted focus time most days – so be sure to block out time in your diary for that in advance. Treat these as commitments too.

Second – review and cull from the rest. They’re are worthwhile meetings – but not your priorities for now. Can you delegate attendance to someone else? Can you ask to receive the meeting notes? Would it be better postponed? If a meeting is unavoidable, could it be shortened? Perhaps only part of the meeting is relevant to you – could you attend just that section?

Choosing who to disappoint

Ultimately an overloaded diary forces us to choose who to disappoint, and what to sacrifice, based on our priorities. There’s always more work than can be possibly be done. And none of us can keep everyone happy all of the time.

We also know that working too late and not taking breaks leaves us less effective, less productive. We know that spreading ourselves too thinly across many commitments risks us underperforming where it matters most.

So it’s time to take control. The gift of your time and attention is too precious to take a first-come-first-served approach to your diary, so don’t automatically accept those meeting invites.

By asking the right questions and spending more time on meeting design, you can have fewer, better meetings focused on the things that matter most to you.