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What Happened When I Deleted Every Meeting From My Calendar

And Four Ways For You To Reclaim Your Time

Hunter Walk
4 min readDec 14, 2020

You want to see the real answer to what you value? Look at your calendar, because how you spend your time is the truest representation of what you care about. I’m going to caveat this entire post with the acknowledgement that almost no one has true ownership of all their time and that the vast majority of people are not in positions to exert agency over their work hours. Many professions ask that you are a schedule taker, not a schedule maker. Sometimes this is merely a result of their working arrangements or nature of their lives and commitments. Other times it’s the unkind practices of their employers, in particular the trend towards “flexible shifts,” where large retailers and hospitality companies treat their workers as widgets. But for those of us who have at least partial influence over how you schedule your time, I want to make a plea: delete all your meetings and start over Jan 1.

What does your calendar look like today? Probably lots of schedule cruft and inefficient combinations of reoccurring meetings that pockmark your days while interrupting productivity. There are also novel calculators meant to help you understand the true cost of a

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Hunter Walk
Hunter Walk

Written by Hunter Walk

You’ll find me @homebrew , Seed Stage Venture Fund w @satyap . Previously made products at YouTube, Google & SecondLife. Married to @cbarlerin .

Responses (4)

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So blitz the entire thing and restart, replan. What could your new calendar look like?

Our established meeting cadence helped us maintain momentum when we briefly reverted to WFH (we are now fully WFO). Our remote offices enjoy the daily standup and it enables us to keep priorities straight.
But yes, get rid of non-Productive ‘cruft’ like too-frequent 1x1s.

1

This is a great article especially for managers that as you point out, are schedule makers.
Or well, if we try to promote these practices in our workplace at least as an experiment and report back after let's say a month, it can become part of the…

Great article, Hunter!