There are too many meetings happening during the day that most of us have very little time to get things done. This has become much worse in Covid times with people scheduling a meeting in any free slot available in your calendar. This makes us hate our calendar as it has started to destroy any deep work capability we had.
Today, I am not going to talk about the negative impact of meetings and calendar invites. Instead, I am going to talk about how the calendar pushes us to get things done and make us accountable.
To make it more clear let us take a couple of examples.
- One of your team members is learning about a tool that can help the team to do work effectively. You don’t want this to be an ever going activity. So, you asked the team member to put a calendar invite when they can present it to the team.
- Your team is struggling to get things delivered. They have too many open items and they don’t seem to close things. You ask them to schedule a demo meeting where they have to demo a specific functionality or list of functionalities.
- You want to learn a new technology/tool/topic in a defined time. You send a meeting invite to your team where you will present your learnings about the tool.
In both, the above examples timelines were not enforced. Team members came up with the timeline and you just want them to honor it by putting it in the calendar invite.
> If it is not in the calendar it is not going to happen.
Why do I think this works?
- A calendar invite limits the time.
- It brings urgency and individuals/teams start to take action. Bias towards action is a good thing. This way people focus on finding answers rather than just asking more questions.
- This helps avoid Parkinson's Law. Parkinson’s law says that that work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion.
- People and teams become accountable. It makes people take action and own their results. Most people have the right intentions. It is just that they are lazy.
- It gives people and teams an opportunity to work backward and plan the work better so that it gets finished. Working backward is a very powerful idea.
- It improves the commitment level.
- It acts as a planning tool. You know how you should plan your work to achieve things.
Again, too much of everything is bad. The calendar has to be used wisely.