Are you controlling your calendar (or is it controlling you??)

Nat: We’re talking calendars again. We covered that your calendar is not a democracy in EP 169, so go and check it out, but today we want to talk about specific mechanics and how we can, I don’t know, make our calendars not be the bane of our existence, because it’s something we think about a lot.

Kristen: Yeah, calendars — what did someone call it? I think it was Jennifer, one of our experts — she said they’re often more of a mythical wish list than an accurate representation of how we spend our time. And that leads to a lot of waste, because we have this optimistic view of our calendar — it may have some blocks in it, some gaps, it may look very nice and organized — and our days don’t reflect it at all. So we want to close that gap and get our calendars to be a representation of what we’re actually getting up to.

Nat: I was reading something that we treat them like a receipt, not a plan. Or is it like an order? So often our calendars will reflect what other people have asked of us. It’s almost like — I don’t know how to describe it, help me articulate this — we have blocks in our calendar to do work that other people have asked of us, not a decision about how the week should go. So a lot of strategic stuff isn’t really in there. It’s more just busy work, you know?

Kristen: Yeah, I like that — a receipt, not an order. It’s whatever comes through, comes out, and it’s sort of retrospective or reactive rather than deliberately planning how your calendar is going to look to best reflect what you need to get done this week. Case in point — I was chatting with a Powrsuiter and I was really curious about how she managed her calendar. She said she accepts every single meeting that comes through.

Nat: How many meeting requests does the typical person get in a day?

Kristen: Oh, a lot — probably more than two hands’ worth. And she said, I accept everything, and then on the Sunday night before, or the Monday morning, that’s when I go through my calendar and decide what I’m actually going to ignore or decline. So it’s almost like kicking the can down the street to future-her. It was really interesting — she’s treating it like a watch list. Some people treat it like a receipt — everything that’s happened. She’s treating it like a dumping ground of all the things she may want to do, that she then sorts through. Other people treat it like orders — it’s dictated entirely by everyone else. And one thing I really like about this topic is that we all probably think we manage our calendar in a normal way, like there’s one right way to do it. But I have yet to see two people manage their calendar the same way, and that’s a real opportunity for Powrsuiters — if we assume our calendar management may not be perfect and make some tweaks, we can probably free up a bunch of time, be more organized, do less context switching, and be a bit less stressed. When your calendar is an accurate representation of what you need to do — not what you’ve done, but what you need to do — you can just follow along block by block, and as long as you keep up with each block, everything you need to get done gets done.

Nat: It’s something I’ve done for years — I plan my weeks based on priorities and front-load the thinking, the mental load, the organizing, the planning, the Tetris-ing. Then when I actually get to the day, like you said, I have zero mental load — I just have to handle the odd thing that shifts. Actually, I put out a LinkedIn poll, so I’ll bring that up in a bit — about what’s going on with people and their calendars right now. But yeah, I’ve found it reduces my mental load during the week.

Kristen: I do exactly the same thing, and I like that you used the word Tetris, because I used to be a master of Tetris. I actually got one of those little grey handheld games from the ’90s that only has Tetris on it recently, and started playing it again — then had to stop because I got addicted again.

Nat: But I treat my calendar like a Tetris board. If I have a three-hour slot for something I need to really think about and work on — the newsletter, for example — I’ll often have a couple of two- or three-hour blocks in. I can move those blocks around if there’s another two- or three-hour gap. So I’ll often go, actually this is now higher priority than that, and move them around. But because the blocks all need to line up to the number of hours, I’m never left pretending or fantasizing about doing twelve hours of work in an eight-hour day. It just doesn’t happen — if the blocks don’t fit, we rejig.

Kristen: I love your commitment to that one. Okay, so 40% of our LinkedIn followers said Tetris — so I’m winning, 40% approach it the way we do. And 60% said work, gym, life, all of it is calendarized, which we also do, so that’s a Venn diagram overlap for us. We’ll get to that with some do’s and don’ts. I like this comment too: “Monday morning calendar audits are so good. I assess the upcoming two weeks, reflect on what’s actually possible — not always easy, but sometimes you just have to live with busy — and it’s a great way to take back ownership of my schedule.”

Nat: I like that two-weeks-out thing. I don’t know if we’ll cover that in the do’s and don’ts, but to your conversation with the Powrsuiter — that Monday morning reorganizing — I always like to look two weeks out. The first week you really want to structure, but the second week, there’s still time to get on top of anything that needs to change or be prioritized, and give the other person plenty of notice. It doesn’t have to be as tight, but it’s nice to look at that second week and make sure everything roughly still fits, because unexpected things always come up. Which is my segue into my weekend story.

Kristen: I was like, how does this fit? We had our planning session this morning and Nat said she had this big weekend and wouldn’t tell me about it until we podcast. I’ve been waiting all day!

Nat: It’s not that big — it’s a good metaphor for unexpected things popping up and you having to take time to deal with them. So this is my segue that I’m wedging in. We were in Japan, and I love pottery — it’s a family thing, my mum is a potter, I collect pottery. So it was important to me to go to a master potter’s store. We were in a region called Takayama, famous for a beautiful cobalt blue pottery. I thought, this is an investment I’m going to make, and Kyla came in with me. So I went in — famous last words, turns out it was my rookie mistake. I perused and found a lovely little vase — they’re really into single-flower simplicity, single-flower vases. I thought, oh, so cute, and I checked the yen conversion. But the way the yen was written was interesting — it used a full stop and then zeros, as opposed to a comma, and I didn’t know what that meant. Turns out it mattered a lot. There was some miscommunication with the woman at the counter — she was speaking to me in Japanese, I didn’t understand a word, I was just nodding and handing her the pot. She packed it all up beautifully, then rang it up at the register, and it was ten times more than what I thought it was going to be. So let’s just say I got really hot and embarrassed on the spot, realizing I was paying ten times more for this tiny vase than I’d anticipated, because I didn’t understand the difference between a full stop and a comma in the pricing. Because she’d packaged it so beautifully, I just handed over my Visa and got really hot — very Canadian of me. I walked out and said to Kyla, “It was really expensive, please don’t ask me how much it is.”

Kristen: And how much was it?

Nat: I said, I will never tell you how much it was. I just had to take it home and put it in a prized location.

Kristen: Can I ask — are we talking tens or hundreds of thousands?

Nat: Hundreds.

Kristen: Okay, recoverable. But won’t he find out — doesn’t he see the credit card?

Nat: I just said I don’t want to talk about it. We were also backpacking for a week, so the hope was he wouldn’t go back and look. So I get home after a week away, and the other day I go looking for the pot — it’s not there. I had it on our TV stand and it’s not there. So I texted Adeline, “Have you seen the pot?” “Certainly not,” she says — I always accuse her of taking things she likes. So then Kyla gets home and I ask, “Have you seen the Japanese pot?” Well, my kind husband thought he’d be helpful a week and a half ago and decluttered the house. He grabbed a whole bunch of things from around the house and put them in a box to donate at one of three local op shops. I freaked out because it was the vase — after everything it had already cost me in shame and guilt and embarrassment, and it was meant to be a prized possession. Ironically, he left the other two pots that my dad had acquired and gifted us, and took the very expensive master-potter piece from the middle of Japan and donated it. Needless to say, my Saturday was shock and rage. I got in the car and drove to three op shops, walked in and said, “This has really sentimental value, my nana gave it to me” — trying not to say it was expensive. Where’s my pot? So there you go. It’s gone.

Kristen: No, it’s gone? I have so many questions. This is a public appeal — if you’re watching us on YouTube, which you should be, we’re not live, but check that out and give Nat her pot back. You just made yourself a bargain! No, someone’s going to look at that and go, that’s a very expensive potter. You just reminded me of the latest Real Survival Stories episode I listened to — these Aussies in the outback, and every time they made a gigantic mistake it was like, you’d never have thought there’d be no water at the water hole. And I thought of that when you said you’d never have thought a decimal point would mean something in currency.

Nat: We’re going on a long tangent here.

Kristen: But I also have so many questions — Kyla decluttering your house without informing you? Who knew? Did he not even run it by you?

Nat: This was a one-off.

Kristen: That’s so funny. I also feel like the flip side is, how cool of him. I’m trying to think what I would have done in that situation, and I think I’m enough of a cheapskate, or I’d be so much more panicked about the money, that I’d just cancel the purchase and deal with the short-term social awkwardness. I’ve had that fine line before, and sometimes gone the other way.

Nat: I’ve been on the other side too. It’s also a culture where you basically bow your way out — honestly, their culture couldn’t be more different from ours.

Kristen: I agree. I’d be really curious to know what I’d do in the same situation — it’d be interesting to know how anyone would do. But I also loved that your relationship with Kyla is such that you’re like, please just never ask about this — and there were some easy ways he could have found out, but he probably didn’t, because he respects you. And then the hilarious juxtaposition of him going and decluttering a bunch of stuff without asking you.

Nat: And then I felt rage when I was in the op shop, because everyone was pouring over the shelves and I was like, you vultures! I had this moment of, oh my god, this is the pot, I wish I’d — the shame of the pot. It honestly was a comedy of errors. It was never meant to be, and I’ve had to let it go. I swore I’d find it funny by Monday, and I do.

Kristen: So this was an unexpected event that took over your calendar, and that was your weekend. Let’s run into do’s and don’ts. I like this one — do change your meeting default. Both Outlook and Google let you end your meetings five to ten minutes early automatically, so that’s an easy way to build in a buffer. This came out of a study Microsoft did, I gather with their own employees — they put EEGs on them, the brainwave caps, and had people go through back-to-back thirty-minute meetings, then measured their brainwaves with gaps in between. No surprise, stress increased without breaks, and stress started to increase in the last five minutes before the end of a meeting going into the next one, because people were context-switching, worrying about the next meeting. Whereas stress remained flat when there were short breaks between meetings. So Microsoft actually launched this feature as a result.

Nat: Because we all know stress means people don’t operate at their best. If you’re thinking about the next meeting in the last five minutes of the current one, that’s literally wasted time, because you’re not doing the work you’re meant to be doing. So acknowledging that is probably a smart choice. I’ve also heard — what was the mini masterclass we did? We had an expert talking about the lack of downtime and those micro-breaks — how stress compounds on stress compounds on stress, and those little breaks, whether or not you’re going back-to-back, even in a normal work day, having five-minute breaks lets those stresses drop.

Kristen: Yes, I think that’s a good one. Don’t — I’ll start with a don’t — don’t leave your default at sixty minutes. I’d be curious to know if anyone still has sixty-minute meetings. We used to, quite a lot, and now I just can’t fathom it. I think if you’re meeting in person, sixty minutes can make sense, because you’ve got to arrive, settle, do the small talk. Although now I make my in-person meetings forty-five minutes, and that’s often meeting a stranger too — if I can do it in forty-five, so can you. The reason is that sixty minutes is a really long time, and we love Parkinson’s Law — work expands to fill the time available. So in a sixty-minute meeting, you’ll potentially subconsciously have some filler chat at the start, go on some tangents like we do on this podcast, get a bit distracted — and what could have been done in fifteen or thirty minutes ends up taking sixty. So don’t leave your default at sixty.

Nat: Our hot take on this is to start with fifteen. We have fifteen, thirty and forty-five, and my default is fifteen unless I can justify it needing longer, in which case it goes to thirty, and only gets to forty-five in very rare situations — if there’s a lot to discuss and I’ve failed a couple of times to stick to thirty, I know I probably need to budget more time.

Kristen: I love a sixty-minute meeting if it’s also a culture-builder at the same time — like our Monday morning planning sessions, which are sixty minutes, and we spend the first twenty catching up and connecting. I think that’s really important to our relationship.

Nat: I appreciate that for people’s relationships, but that’s an exception to the rule — when we’ve got work to do or a decision to make, those are short and sharp.

Kristen: Agreed. But then, like this morning, I said I’ve got to leave in thirty, and we’re also very happy to finish early — so we make them sixty at the longest, but happy to call it partway through if we want to. I was also thinking this morning about do’s and don’ts around agendas. The average person — when we did a poll at a mini masterclass, and we’ve got a session coming up this week inside Powrsuit about taking back your calendar, so it’s top of mind — when we polled people who’d done this session before, they had between twenty and sixty meetings in a week. So most people probably range between fifteen and thirty. And when you make this rule of “have an agenda,” we know people slip out of formal agendas, we know you don’t always have time for one. The purpose of the agenda is to get really clear on what the meeting is for and what success looks like at the other end. My tweak on the agenda is to put it in the description field — title your meeting accordingly, and use the description field for the agenda: what we’re meeting about, is it a decision, is it to get on the same page, is it to generate an idea. Be very clear on what that looks like, so by the time you leave, you can check, did we do that thing or not.

Nat: I love it. And a lot of agendas are actually quite simple. When we talk agendas, people think, oh gosh, I need a whole page. But often meetings are about one question that needs answering, one or two decisions that need making, or an update. So the agenda can be quite simple — it just needs to be documented somewhere, even in an email. If you don’t know what the meeting’s for, you don’t turn up not knowing what it’s for. That’s more wasted hours.

Kristen: Don’t let travel be invisible. I have yet to set up my calendar to automatically add travel times — I think Google Calendar’s changed again, so I manually add a block before and after. I used to add thirty minutes for travel time, and now I’ve increased it to forty-five. The commute into town is probably about thirty, but that extra fifteen minutes means if I suddenly realize I haven’t put my lipstick on, or the bus is running late, it just helps me be a little less stressed. I have no problem turning up and having one or two minutes to sit and chill. So block out your travel time, make it realistic, and it’s actually okay to budget a couple of minutes to sit and breathe while you’re waiting for your next thing.

Nat: I love this tip from Jennifer Hewitt, who ran a mini masterclass in Powrsuit — she was all about making sure you block time for the actual work. Block your prep time first, that can be fifteen to thirty minutes — doesn’t have to be right before the meeting. If you’ve got a recurring meeting every Monday afternoon, you could block fifteen minutes in the morning to prep. And always pre-block the work that comes out of the meeting. Most often there’s actual work — actions — that come out of it, and we get to the end of the day and think, now I need to get that done. If you’ve got a recurring meeting where you know work comes out of it every time, block thirty minutes to actually do that work.

Kristen: I like it. I’m going to skip “don’t book back to back” since we’ve kind of covered that, and change it to don’t forget focus time. If you need to do professional development, go to the gym, sit and work on a document or a proposal or a slide deck, don’t forget to block time to do that — otherwise you’ll be left with five-to-fifteen-minute chunks between meetings, and if you’re anything like me, you have to load the whole thing up in your head in that first fifteen minutes, just get in the zone, and then get interrupted again. It’s such wasted time not having a block set aside to do the thing.

Nat: It also reduces stress, because you know you’ve actually got the time set aside to do it, and it lets you work at your best — you can load up the whole project in your head and then have uninterrupted time for an hour or more. Put your headphones on if you’re in a shared space too, to signal you’re not available for chats.

Kristen: The one off the back of that is to actually name your block — for a focus block or deep work block, naming it indicates to your brain the piece of work or problem you’re trying to solve. But equally, name your personal blocks. For example, Nat, if you open my calendar today, I have a block after this session, during lunch — it’s “walk the dog.” So you have visibility into my calendar and can see that.

Nat: The nice thing about that is it removes the mental load — I know you’re walking the dog after this, you might have gym at 7pm too, and it removes the mental load of deciding if and when to do it. But by naming it, I think it does two things — it reinforces the importance of that piece of work or time, and if we had to negotiate that time block, like if noon was the only time we could get together for a deliverable this week, you’d know that’s movable for me, I don’t have to walk the dog right then. By naming it, you can go, hey, can we Tetris this? And I’d move it around.

Kristen: I’d say we only know that about each other because we’ve worked together for a long time. So if you’re working with a colleague who’s got “take the kids to the pool” blocked, don’t book over that time unless you know for sure they’re comfortable with it. My final one is don’t forget the small stuff. A lot of us, when we get those three-to-ten-minute blocks, start scrolling the news, going on Instagram, LinkedIn, checking email — and we’re wasting these little bits of time throughout the day that don’t bring us peace or rest, and we don’t have dedicated time for things like checking email. I block that out — I effectively triage my emails. I go through, wipe out all the junk and news that isn’t anything, then open up the new ones and ask, do I need to respond to this today? What will I need to do to respond? If it’s a decent amount of work — like putting together a proposal — I’ll calendarize that as a block, because that’s not email anymore, that’s a piece of work. For things I don’t need to urgently respond to, I mark them as read. If I do need to respond, I normally give myself one to two days’ leeway and then answer them all in a block when it’s not my top-performing hour, getting through them all at once rather than as they come in. Calendarizing that block stops the urge to constantly check and respond to emails, but also makes sure you have that time set aside, because email is never as simple as just opening and reading.

Nat: The only difference for me — I made a concerted effort, I think it was over summer, to unsubscribe from every piece of junk and every newsletter, so I no longer get any of that. I only typically get family, work and Powrsuit emails now. And the other difference — when I know something’s important, I leave it unread. If it’s unread, I know it’s important and I’ll deal with it — it’s weird, I just have a sense. It could be a reply to my email, from a partner, whatever — I leave it unread, and that’s my flag. I often miss it if I’ve read and opened it, or gotten distracted.

Kristen: Wait — I leave mine as read once I’ve read them, and then re-mark them as unread, because I’ll get distracted and do the thing — I know I will.

Nat: So you leave it unread. I don’t triage, because there’s no triaging — it would take over. I’m easily distracted, that was my report card as a kid, and I’m gone — down a rabbit hole in there, whatever it is.

Kristen: I love that as a tactic — if you get something you struggle with, don’t read it, you don’t have to. So I’ve got, say, two hundred and thirty in my inbox, and that’s when I’ll actually go through it — today. And so my last tip, actually I’ve got two. The first is the scan — I read that someone does a Monday scan, which is great, others do a Friday scan. Whatever you’re doing, take on the mental load of doing that strategic scan before you get to the day, so you don’t feel like that time is no longer yours. Assess — does everything in there need to be there? Does it add value? Does it move things forward? Is there one thing I can remove? Which leads me to my final point: repeating meetings. If that’s the one thing to question in a given week during your scan, do it. I like this tip that when you put in a recurring meeting, put an end date in three months, so you can revisit whether it actually needs to be recurring. That could be the one conversation you bring up: “I’ve noticed this is a recurring meeting, it’s maybe no longer serving us, can we shorten it or stop it?”

Nat: I like it. I’ll add one final one — don’t send an invite you wouldn’t want someone to send to you. We’re all guilty of outsourcing our work to other people, rather than Googling it, checking ChatGPT, checking through an inbox ourselves, or whatever it might be to find the answer. It can be easier to flick it over to someone else, or easier to say, starting with a blank page is hard, I’m going to start with a meeting instead. Really stop and think before you clog up other people’s inboxes and calendars — do I need someone else’s time? What’s the minimum amount of time I could get from them, and the most convenient time for them? I’ve been thinking a lot about friction, and it’s just so frictionless to add more noise to other people’s calendars. Add back that friction, and create the culture you want to be part of — one where we really respect each other’s time and try to minimize inconvenience to each other. That creates a really nice working environment.

Kristen: If you struggle in this area, we’ve got three mini masterclasses. By the time you listen to this, come into Powrsuit, hit us up, we’ll give you a discount for the first month. Check out Jennifer Hewitt’s mini masterclass on calendar hacks, our mini masterclass on how to take back your time, Lauren Silvester’s on time ownership and how to do resets, and we’ve also got the art of prioritization, which helps you delineate what’s an actual rock versus what you’re doing in deep focus time, and how to distinguish between a rock, a pebble and sand. Check us out at powrsuit.com and get in touch if you want a discount, we’d love to have you on for a month. Any last words, Nat?

Nat: No — thanks everyone, we’ll catch you next time. Bye!