I wish I could say that today’s blog post was delayed so I could experiment with posting schedules—it wasn’t. As parents and professionals, sometimes we fail to make enough time. I forgive me, and I hope you forgive me too.
On the subject of time, I am staring at my calendar today and asking myself a plethora of questions. Why does this look like Swiss cheese? Who hates me so much to schedule so many meetings so haphazardly? How will I fit all my one to two-hour tasks into these tiny thirty-minute holes?
I started by taking the first of those thirty-minute meeting gaps and scheduling a meeting with me as the only attendee. The meeting subject I chose was “Feel sorry for myself.”
It would be easy to do that for all the remaining thirty-minute chunks of time. Then, I would look busy on paper and feel really smug about how self-satisfying that is. Unfortunately, none of the really important stuff I needed to do would get done.
Shelley wrote about this when he wrote: “Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!”
Are you super-sad for me yet? Sad enough to need an Amazon-Affiliate-Linked box of Kleenex (most popular?)
I didn’t think so.
So, what can you do to preserve some calendar time and some sanity?
Good reader, I want to remind you that there are companies out there that have created packs of six hot dogs, and other companies that have created packs of eight hot dog buns. This is a very real problem.
I have decided that I am going to apply an anti-pattern here and lean into the two-bun gap.
The best way to preserve my sanity is to reverse-defrag my calendar.
Let me explain. Everyone loves a thirty-minute meeting. To preserve my sanity, I will start scheduling forty-five-minute meetings and “do not book” blocks.
For everyone else out there, stuck in their thirty-minute thinking, all their meetings will start at the top of the hour or half past. They are going to either help add fifteen minutes to my anxiety-inducing gaps, which makes them slightly more useful to me, or book them so that I only have fifteen-minute gaps, which I will use to turn away from my computer and scream into the void.
Insert a double-finger-guns emoji here, and profit. Win-win here amirite?
In all seriousness, we are ruled by our calendars, and scheduling can feel like warfare. Sometimes, you need to bear down and get stuff done. You can do things to create odd-shaped gaps in your calendar if you need to.
Conversely, this is also a tool you can use to help your fledgling leaders delegate more. On one hand, you can schedule a handful of forty-five-minute meetings with them. On the other hand, in more extreme cases, you can book an hour or even longer to ensure they don’t have time to cannibalize their teams by doing IC work.
So now we find ourselves at the end of another weekly blog post, and everyone is wondering, “Is John fucking serious?”
Maybe. Sometimes, you have to get serious to get stuff done. And if that means you need to turn the calendar into a weapon, so be it. Eat those six hot dogs and those six hot dog buns.
You will thank me when you are all finished, and you have tossed the two expired hotdog buns in the trash.
See you next week!
