Taking back control of your triple-booked calendar, without compromising your value-add
Why we couldn't resist the urge to accept meeting invites and let work life erode home life
One of the most frustrating things at work is trying to book a meeting to resolve an urgent issue for your project, yet everyone's schedule is blocked from 7am-7pm for the next three weeks. You either spend your next day synchronising with every stakeholder to free up a common slot, or wait three weeks and hope that the urgent situation stands still.
Now flip that around and take a look at your schedule - very likely yours is equally saturated. Take a closer look - some of the meetings are crucial, especially those related to your own projects. Yet most of the remainder are about projects loosely relevant to you as a stakeholder. They could be regular status meetings, ad hoc issue resolution discussions, or workshops.
Focus on these stakeholder meetings, and reflect on what happened during the meetings, and afterwards. Was the time well spent? Did you receive relevant information throughout? Did you contribute sufficiently? Did they attract your attention for the duration? Did you believe the meetings were tuned to you as an audience?
If your answers are no, then you can take back control of your calendar by freeing yourself from these meetings. The Industry Box team has reviewed this situation with a number of managers and executives, and come up with ways to do it wisely. Fewer meetings, same value-add, more control of your work life.
Understanding the paradox of spending time on unproductive meetings
These meetings are clogging up your calendar and have a known history of being unproductive (to you, at least), but very rarely would you decline to attend. What are the glues that make you stick?
The answers - the inefficient project-team-centric information chain , the unsavoury "self-centric" alternative, and the options in between.
You need quality information to contribute, but the project-team-centric information chain does not serve you well
As a stakeholder, you are involved in the project because of the key contributions you could make. You are pairing up your expertise (a combination of skills, domain knowledge and previous project experience) with the project's information to craft your contribution.
As a good stakeholder, you don't want to provide half-baked contributions, and you would want to update your contribution as the project progresses. For that, you need to keep receiving project updates, and dive deep where it matters to you.
All information originates from the project team and are disseminated through channels of their choice, at a frequency of their choice, and at a content structure of their choice. It is centred around the project team.
Much as the project team want to cater to stakeholders' need, so as to maximise contribution, the team is usually small compared to the stakeholder group. It's beyond their capacity to prepare customised information for each stakeholder. Between keeping the project team efficient and the stakeholders efficient, they have chosen the former.
The result is the meeting schedule you receive - lots of long meetings, only partially relevant, and you need to spend time piecing information together afterwards.
The "self-centric" alternative means you keep yourself productive at the expense of everyone else, the project team in particular
You might not have experienced "self-centric", stakeholders so it's worth detailing. There are stakeholders who are in hot demand across multiple projects, or prize their productivity above all else. They would proactively refuse to participate in meetings or discussions unless centred around them with highly relevant information, and focused on soliciting their contribution. You are highly unlikely to be one of them, given that you are reading this article.
Those stakeholders are attempting to "flip the situation over" so that they could keep their calendars meaningfully filled. But it's exerting additional burden on the project team to customise the materials, and just having a few stakeholders requesting the same treatment would distract the team from core work.
A personalised treatment is unproductive for high velocity, in-flux projects. These projects are responding to multiple changes over a short period of time, and stakeholders must bring their contributions to the table, interact with each other and update their contributions together. A stakeholder segregating oneself from collaborative activities can only provide out-dated and un-fitting contributions. Hardly value-adding to the project.
Those stakeholders are like brakes that slow down project progress, if not grinding it to a halt. It's a destructive alternative to working around a project-team-centric information chain.
Anything in between "project-team-centric" and "self-centric" information chains is too tactical to meaningfully take back control of your calendar
Most of us have been in this camp before, and as a reminder here is how it works. You would look at a meeting's agenda an hour before it starts, decide it's not that important, and skip. Or you join a meeting, and halfway through ask the host whether you are still needed, they would say "no" and you would drop off early.
This method works when you need to get through a quadruple-booked week, but its benefits usually fizzle out after a short while. It's quite some effort to decide ad hoc whether to attend a meeting, and if you have indeed missed important information from the meeting, catching up afterwards would take time and delay your contribution. You are also missing out the discussions that have taken place, diminishing your contribution to the project.
On the other hand, the project team might have expected your attendance to form a quorum, and your last-minute drop-off would mean the meeting is cancelled and re-scheduled, or a follow-up is requested by other attendees to secure your contribution.
This approach helps you gain nuggets of flexibility in your calendar, but it's far from taking back control. Most of us end up returning to the paradoxical arrangement of attending unproductive meetings.
Break free of project-team-centric information chain, end the paradox and take back control
If you overcome default project-team-centric information chain, the official meeting schedule will lose its grip on your calendar. You will then have freedom and confidence to decide which meetings to attend, without compromising your contribution. You will stay valuable to the project, and have control over your calendar.
Information will always originate from the project team, which means we will maintain information dependency on the project team. But your goal is to create an alternative chain, which interacts with the source information differently and gives you control. It's okay for the source to stay within the project team.
So let's start.
End dependency on the project-team-centric information chain by stop saying "I am waiting for the latest project scope and contribution request"
The information chain drip-feeds you with the latest project scope, updates and actions, which prompt you into contribution. If you are always tuning in meeting after meeting to be dished out the next package of information and contribution request, you are a passive stakeholder 100% dependent on this information chain.
Like all old-habit-busting campaigns, you need to move into a conscious position. In this case, it means ceasing to wait for the next package drop. Instead, use the materials you have to date to come up with your own understanding of why the project is important, what its design is, where the implementation is headed, and how you might be involved as a contributor.
You may not have the latest information to get an accurate picture, but this is yourpicture that is crafted from your angle, suited to your need, and it's just the start. Moreover, your relationship with the information chain has shifted - you are now using the chain to furnish your picture, not to give you the picture; you can start to use your picture to prepare your contribution, not just waiting for the official prompt. You are building out your independence.
When you receive a meeting invite, don't decline last-minute but ask "how will it affect my picture" and decide upfront
Declining a meeting last minute or declaring that you are going to "stay only for the first 30 mins" throw the project team off balance. It is also done out of convenience to yourself when you can't juggle between projects, instead of with your contribution to the project at heart.
With your own picture about the project, you have a second source of reference to weigh up the relevance of this meeting. See if it is updating your picture, or allowing your picture to influence the project or other stakeholders. See also if the updating or influencing process need to be done in the meeting, versus outside of the meeting such as submitting your views by email.
If the meeting agenda is absent, then go back to the project team and ask for it, or decline politely. You now have a yardstick to form a clear view of a meeting's necessity, and relay back to the project team. You can now free up your calendar significantly, and there's more.
When your picture of the project conflicts with the official version, don't wait for the next meeting but go to the project team to clear up the differences
You are now removing the last grip of the information chain - providing facetime with the project team to question the project. Surely, you could ask questions to the project team via email or chat tools, but if you were in tightly gripped by the default information chain, you would be waiting for the meeting to give you the information you need to form a view and then question back.
With your own picture for at hand, you could identify hidden areas of conflict, and formulate your questions clearly and supported with facts. The project team could see your concern, validate and return with a definitive answer, instead of degenerating into a vague investigation that distracts from core work. You no longer need to attend a meeting to wait to let out your challenge.
What's more, with your well-drafted questions, it could influence how the next meetings are organised, helping the project team optimise the information chain with more succinct and to-the-point meetings. Not just that you have freed yourself from compulsive meeting attendance, you are making the meetings more valuable to attend for other stakeholders.
If you are worried about the time-cost of all these activities, think about the true opportunity cost of having no control over your calendar
This set of actions to take back control does look strenuous. It could indeed be an over-kill if your triple-booked calendar is transient, lasting just for a month or so as a few projects' milestones happen to overlap.
But if you are chronically suffering from a busy calendar, think about what you are actually missing out:
- You are constantly starting early and staying late, and your mind cannot relax over weekends
- Your own urgent meetings are pushed back by a few days each time. A two-week decision cycle now takes four weeks
- You struggle to contribute to projects succinctly, leading to rounds of back-and-forth spreading across multiple meetings that demotivate you and the project team alike
- Bad decisions are made on a project, but you can't formulate a solid case to push back
- You don't have enough capacity to support the next new, high profile project
Our suggested actions are an upfront investment at the start of each project, followed by small up-keep throughout the duration. The longer and bigger a project, the greater the return on investment in terms of meetings saved. The saving goes towards your own projects, or other projects that are propelling you up the personal development curve. It's your choice how to use it.
Why not receive our future posts directly in your inbox? Subscribe to Industry Box newsletter: https://industrybox.substack.com
About Industry Box:
Industry Box is dedicated to introducing streamlined & frictionless stakeholder management, as we believe this to be a hidden productivity blackhole for most companies and managers.
Apart from raising awareness about this issue and promoting industry best practice, we have also designed a digital tool with all the best practices built in, so that managers & leaders can introduce and benefit from best-in-class stakeholder management without the learning curve.