The calendar audit

Four times a year, I take an hour and go through my calendar for the next three months. I am not looking for meetings to attend. I am looking for meetings to remove.

The test is simple. For each recurring event I ask whether I would accept the invite today if it arrived for the first time. If the answer is no, I decline it, and I send the organiser a two-line message saying what I would need to see before rejoining. Out of 31 recurring events in my last audit, I declined nine. Only one organiser replied with any resistance.

---

The part I did not expect is how much of the saved time went into a kind of idleness I now guard. I have two afternoons a week with nothing on them. People assume I am doing deep work. Mostly I am reading, or walking to the shop, or looking at a screen I designed last month with fresh eyes. It all counts.

I borrowed the idea from Cal Newport’s writing on deep work, though I have not followed his advice to the letter. I keep Slack open. I just have fewer reasons to look at it.

The rule I break

I never audit the meetings that other people call “optional”. Those are the ones that matter most, because I attend them out of politeness. If you decline one and nothing bad happens, you have learned something. If something bad does happen, you have also learned something.