Almost every manager I work with faces the same problem: finding enough time in the day to get anything done. They went from the world of the individual contributor, where there were maybe a few meetings in a day, to a world where everyone seemingly wants their time in the form of a meeting all day long. They end their day exhausted with not having accomplished anything.

Many managers see themselves as facilitators and therefore going to some meetings, where they have nothing to contribute, is part of the job. If they aren’t there to gain context and visibility, then what is their true value?

Don’t fall into that trap! I’ve found that the more you are intentional and strategic with your own work and own team, the more respect, scope, and responsibility you get as a result. This includes meetings! Make a choice. Instead of being the fly on the wall at every meeting, be the manager who delegates to others and has a process by which the right information gets to the right places so that the teams you manage have real, measurable impacts. That’s how to get ahead! Here’s more on how to do that:

Insist on Meeting Agendas

The first step to being a great manager who has control over her calendar is to maximize the value of your time by insisting that there is an agenda for every meeting you go to. At first this too might seem difficult to broach.

For example, a colleague creates a meeting with your whole team called Chat about Releases; nothing is in the meeting description. Well of course, they think this is a valuable use of time; why else would they have created the meeting?

It’s sad to say that actually a lot of meetings are created because people don’t want to follow your process. Or they don’t know your process. Or they are stuck in the rut of letting a meeting solve every problem. Whatever the case, it’s up to you to set the tone for you and your team: follow up with people who call the meetings and get clarity about what problem they have that they are trying to solve and what each person in that meeting needs to contribute to a solution.

With these in place, you have an agenda! So the Chat about Releases meeting becomes BigCorp Defects in Release 9.3— Retrospective with an agenda of:

1. Review BigCorp defects (link to document)
2. Actions team is taking to make the next release better
3. Agreement on messaging to BigCorp and leadership

That’s an agenda! Insist on it every time! With that in place, reinforce the agenda with clear action items leaving the meeting and a system in place to ensure that people execute those actions. Soon enough you’ll find almost all of your meetings become action oriented and your time spent is much more efficiently.

Get Comfortable with Declining Meetings

The next step on this journey to controlling your calendar is to normalize rejecting or delegating meetings. Here’s a secret: you don’t have to do everything. In fact, the term manager implies that you’re managing other peoples’ work, so it’s in the job description for you to delegate this to another team member. Alternatively, you can respond with, “That’s not within my scope,” and reject the meeting invite. I do this politely and openly, but I also do this very often.

I reject standing meetings the most often. These meet weekly, have a set, normal agenda, and are usually recorded. Usually, I have nothing to say in those meetings, or I ask a delegate who is more in tune with the standing meeting’s issues to attend. If there might be important information, I watch the recording later or even read the meeting notes if they’re shared. The key is to avoid any meeting where there is at least a 95% chance that you will take a passive role.

Create an Ideal Schedule

Now that we have the parameters in place for the types of meetings you should go to and that you are able to decline the meetings that don’t fit, the next step is to create an ideal schedule to take strategic control over your calendar. I utilize this through the Full Focus Planner I have used for years. Every quarter, the planner encourages you to fill out an ideal schedule for a week. This allows you to focus on how you really want to spend your time to meet your goals.

It’s also helpful to begin categorizing your days or your day parts. For example, Wednesdays, many of us go into the office. So I schedule Wednesdays to be in the office with free time to collaborate with the people there. I also limit personal appointments to Monday afternoons, if possible, and don’t schedule 1:1s at that time. On Tuesdays, I think about one of my teams, Wednesdays with another, and Thursdays with the third. Your results may vary, but planning like this helps you think like this and make better use of your time.

Once you have an ideal schedule, you can then plan a week in advance. This is when you apply all the rules above, not at the last minute. I do this on Sunday nights through the Full Focus Planner, and alongside this create goals and targets for the week.

Conclusion

Once you follow these steps, you’ll feel like you have a new lease on life and a completely different job. While before you were pushed back and forth by whatever demand was placed on you, now you are truly proactive and are putting first things first. What’s left is to lead by example and to share this with your team members. Once everyone is intentional about their calendars, you unlock a whole new level of productivity for everyone. And this level of productivity will open up so many opportunities for your growth as a leader.

You might ask after reading this post, you might ask that the hardest part of managing your schedule is managing your boss’ expectations of you to be at certain meetings. That will be the subject of the next post.