What Happened When I Deleted Every Meeting From My Calendar

And Four Ways For You To Reclaim Your Time

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…