calendar defragging with ayushi roy
17 Jun 2023back in may i was having a conversation with my friends, ben and ayushi and ayushi shared an awesome practice i’d like to share! she calls it a calendar defrag.
here’s my best summary of how it goes:
- have everyone in the team or org write all their meetings down
- rank them by effectiveness
- get rid of the bottom 30% of meetings.
- for internal meetings, let team members handle doing the cancelling and reconfiguring needed. for meetings with external people, ayushi, communicates with the external folks about the shift and initiates the process of figuring out how to get what’s needed differently. for internal and external meetings, the reconfiguring process looks like getting clarity about what that meeting does (or is supposed to) deliver and coming up with ways to get those outcomes in other ways.
if you’ve ever worked in an organization with too many meetings, you will likely immediately see the benefit to this practice. if you haven’t, teach us your ways lol!
over time, as people and teams and plans and goals shift, meeting that us to be effective can slowly dwindle in their value. this can happen in many ways:
- the meeting experiences purpose/mission creep as people use the meeting to accomplish tasks that don’t have enough support/space in the proper places
- the meeting leader transitions and the new leader is less clear on the purpose than the original person
- the original purpose starts getting accomplished in some other space
- the list goes on…
but i just love the idea of regularly taking all the meetings a team has, putting them all together, and reworking the whole system. in fact, now that i think about it, we did something like this when i worked at css. maybe i’ll see if i can get angus to chat with me and summarize what we did there…
words / writing / post-processing
294w / 12min / xmin