Efficient Calendar Habits: Banishing Time-Wasting for Good
One of these days while listening to one of Lenny’s Podcast episodes, I came across a great advice on maintaining a clear and focused calendar.
The podcast speaker emphasized the importance of avoiding the common trap of becoming a ‘meeting hopper’ — someone who constantly jumps from one meeting to another, delivering minimal results (unless that jumping from meeting to meeting is your job 😅).
The insights shared offered practical strategies for cultivating a more efficient and purposeful approach to daily tasks.
The advice was, during a gap of 1–2 months, after every meeting, you take some minutes to reflect, go back to your calendar, and paint the event in a color that reflects how relevant that meeting was for you.
I came up with 4 colors/categories:
- Blue — Inevitable: Dailies, Sprint Planning, All-Hands…
- Yellow — Not productive (for me)
- Green — Productive
- Gray — is just a category I created to be ignored from time-tracking calculations and charts
Based on my experience, I didn’t need much reflection time. By the middle of the meeting I already knew if it was relevant/productive for me.
After the end of the first week, I was already able to check the outcome of my week and make decisions on what could I improve. (Btw, great time tracker from Google here. I love this feature.)
In case you have the energy and time, it’s also nice that you write bullet points with the reasons a meeting was productive or not for you. In my case, I found that very time-consuming so I didn’t do it.
After a few months, you’ll start seeing that some of the same meetings start repeating as “Not Productive” or “Productive”.. and then it’s time to take action. So you have a few options:
- You can get to your leader and let him/her know that some of the meetings are just a waste of your time and you would rather focus on actual work.
- You can talk to the participants of the meetings and try to refactor the meeting purpose or dynamic — making it more efficient for everyone.
- Do nothing and continue having your time drained out 🫠
You can do this meeting tracking by using any calendar, but the best thing about using Google Calendar is that you can use your data tracking and charts to support your arguments. Data doesn’t lie (if properly tracked).
Another great point from the Podcast was that if most of your work is not productive and you don't feel like changing it or making it better, this can also be a Red Flag for you to shift your career goals. Maybe that job/position/function is not something you get excited about anymore. And it's fine to help yourself to get to this conclusion and eventually face it :)
I’ve seen people and I’ve been into situations of being overwhelmed by meetings all day, getting to the point that when I had a free time between meetings I was so exhausted or even still processing past meetings, that I was not able to be productive and ended up feeling frustrated and drained out by the end of the day.
This practice helped me a lot in the past to implement better habits and keep focus. Maybe it helps you too :)
