The calendar audit

Hi, it's Nora.

Saturday I asked you to do a ninety minute reset and put three things on the calendar for the rest of the year. Some of you wrote back to say a version of the same thing, which is: there's no room. The calendar was full before I got there.

Fair. So today, the room.

Here's the thing about a full calendar. Almost none of it was decided recently. Recurring meetings get created once, usually in a moment of genuine need, and then they run forever, because creating one takes ten seconds and killing one requires a person to volunteer to be the bad guy. So they accumulate. The Tuesday sync that solved a real problem in March is still running in September, long after the problem was solved, attended by nine people who all privately think it's pointless and all assume somebody else finds it useful.

That's the whole dynamic. Recurring commitments have an owner for creation and no owner for deletion. Which means the default direction of any calendar, at work and at home, is fuller. Not because anyone decided that. Because nobody decided anything.

An audit is just somebody finally deciding. It takes about an hour, you do it four times a year, and it's the highest return hour on this entire newsletter.

Block sixty minutes this week. Put it on the calendar, which is a joke I'm aware of, but it won't happen otherwise.

Then get the last four weeks in front of you where you can see it all at once. Print it if you can, and yes, on paper. Four weeks on a screen is a scroll and you'll evaluate each item in isolation. Four weeks on paper is a picture, and the picture is the point. You're looking for the shape of your month, not the merits of a Thursday call.

Now mark every recurring item with one of two letters. C if you created it. I if you inherited it, meaning it existed before you or somebody else put it there.

Almost everyone finds the same thing, which is that the majority of their week is I. That's the number worth sitting with for a second. Most of your working life is running on decisions made by other people, some of whom no longer work there.

Go through every recurring thing on the page and ask these in order. Be fast, thirty seconds each, first instinct.

What breaks if this doesn't happen for a month? Not "is it useful." Useful is a very low bar and nearly everything clears it. The question is what actually fails. For a surprising number of standing meetings the honest answer is nothing, and the meeting persists only because it's on the calendar.

Is this a decision, a discussion, or a broadcast? This one does the most work. Decisions need the people who decide, and they need to be short. Discussions need the right small group and genuinely benefit from live conversation. Broadcasts, which is one person telling everyone else what happened, should not be meetings at all. They should be four paragraphs that people read in ninety seconds on their own time. A meeting that is mostly a broadcast is a document being read aloud very slowly to a room of adults who can read.

Would I accept this invitation today if it arrived fresh? Strip the history out. If this landed in your inbox this morning, brand new, would you say yes. Most inherited items fail this instantly, and the only reason they survive is that "cancel" feels more aggressive than "never joined."

Who would notice if I stopped attending? Not stopped it, just stopped going. If the answer is genuinely nobody, you've learned something. If the answer is one person, that's not a meeting, that's a conversation with one person, and it should be that instead.

Every item gets exactly one. No maybes, because maybe means it stays.

Kill. It ends. If you own it, cancel the series today, not at the end of the quarter. If you don't own it, see the scripts below.

Shrink. It survives at a smaller size. This is where most items land and it's where most of the time comes back. Sixty becomes thirty. Weekly becomes fortnightly. Nine attendees becomes four.

On length specifically: default to twenty five and fifty minutes instead of thirty and sixty. Every calendar tool will do this for you in settings and it takes about forty seconds to turn on. It gives you back five minutes an hour, which sounds trivial and is not, because it's the difference between arriving at the next thing composed and arriving at it already behind. If you have five hours of meetings on a Tuesday, that's twenty five minutes of recovered buffer you did not have to negotiate with anyone to get.

On attendees: the cost of a meeting is length times people, and almost everyone optimizes only the length. A sixty minute meeting with eight people costs eight hours. Cutting it to forty five saves two hours. Cutting it to four people saves four. Cut people first.

Downgrade. It becomes something other than a meeting. Usually a written update on a shared doc, sometimes a short recorded walkthrough, sometimes a thread. This is the right verdict for nearly everything you labelled a broadcast. The rule I'd offer: if the meeting exists so that people are informed, it's a document. If it exists so that people can respond in real time to each other, it's a meeting.

Every recurring meeting gets an expiry date. Ninety days, then it stops automatically unless somebody actively renews it. This single change fixes the underlying problem permanently, because it moves the burden from "somebody must volunteer to kill this" to "somebody must volunteer to keep this." Nobody has to be the bad guy. Things just end unless they're wanted. Set it on every series you own, and suggest it for the ones you don't.

No agenda, no meeting. If there's no agenda in the invite by the night before, it doesn't happen. Say it once, publicly, and then hold it exactly one time, which is the only part that's hard. An agenda takes two minutes to write and its real function isn't organization, it's forcing the organizer to answer what this is for. A meeting nobody can write two lines about is a meeting nobody needed.

Most of your calendar isn't yours to cancel. That's fine, you have more leverage than you think, and none of these require a confrontation.

To leave a meeting. "I don't think I'm adding much here. Happy to stay on the notes and jump in if something needs me." Nobody has ever fought this. You are volunteering to be less of a burden.

To shrink one. "Could we try this at thirty for a month and see if we lose anything?" A time boxed experiment is easy to say yes to because it isn't a permanent decision. Nobody ever asks to go back.

To downgrade one. "What if I send this as a written update on Monday and we only meet when something needs a decision?" You're taking on work, which makes it very hard to refuse, and you're getting the hour back.

To kill one you don't own. "Is this one still earning its slot? Happy either way, just noticed we mostly cover it in the Thursday thread." Ask it as a question and let the owner reach the conclusion. Half the time they've been thinking the same thing and were waiting for anyone at all to say it first.

When you've finished cutting, put one block back before the space fills itself.

A recurring, protected, three hour block with no meetings in it. One per week, same day, same time, treated as immovable. If your calendar is public, give it a name that reads as real work, because a block called "focus" is an invitation and a block called "Q4 forecast build" is not.

Three hours because two is one real block plus interruptions, and because most meaningful work has a warm up cost of about twenty minutes that you pay every single time you're interrupted. Four one hour gaps are not four hours. They're four warm ups.

This is the whole reason to do the audit. Not to be less busy. To assemble the fragments into one piece big enough to do something with.

Rough numbers from doing this a lot. A typical audit kills two recurring items, shrinks four, and downgrades one. On an average week that's somewhere between four and six hours.

Call it five. Twenty hours a month. Against sixty minutes, four times a year.

I'd add one honest caveat, which is that the hours don't stay bought. Calendars refill, because the same dynamic that filled it the first time is still running. That's why this is quarterly and not once. Put the next one on the calendar for the first week of December while you're in there.

Sixty minutes this week. Four weeks on paper. C or I next to everything.

Back Saturday, when I want to talk about the other thing quietly eating your week, which is not on your calendar at all.

Better, not busier.

Nora Bishop

P.S. The protected block is a cousin of tactic eleven in Better, Not Busier, the free guide. And if you missed it, the default setting is the companion piece to this one: this is about removing decisions from your calendar, that one is about removing them from your day.