How Do You Time-Block Plan in a Company Obsessed with Last Minute Meetings?

00:00:00.000 | [Music]

00:00:04.720 | Moving on, we have a question from Noah.

00:00:07.840 | Noah is asking about time blocking.

00:00:10.880 | He says, "How do you time block plan within a company culture

00:00:14.160 | that's apt to throw a meeting on your calendar if it's marked as free?"

00:00:19.360 | Well, honestly, Noah, what you really need to do here is take

00:00:23.200 | all your colleagues in this company,

00:00:26.800 | lock them in a room like in the first Saw movie,

00:00:30.000 | but instead of them having to cut the leg off of someone else to get out of that room,

00:00:33.360 | they have to read A World Without E-mail before you'll give them any water.

00:00:36.320 | And I think then you'll solve your problem because I hate these type of cultures.

00:00:40.480 | It's a huge issue and I feel your pain.

00:00:44.480 | Let's just start there.

00:00:45.280 | So long term, that's going to be your solution is, of course, you want to change this culture.

00:00:48.880 | This is an ad hoc, on-demand, haphazard approach to work.

00:00:53.840 | It's the hyperactive, hive mind personified.

00:00:56.800 | It's an approach to work where you just rock and roll.

00:00:59.280 | Oh, I want to do this.

00:01:00.000 | Let's get a meeting on the books.

00:01:01.120 | Let's shoot an email to this person.

00:01:02.160 | Let's grab this person by Slack.

00:01:03.360 | What about that?

00:01:03.920 | I don't know.

00:01:04.240 | Let's just jump on and have a meeting.

00:01:05.520 | Let's do a call.

00:01:06.240 | Let's circle around on this.

00:01:07.360 | Let's circle back.

00:01:08.240 | Let's jump on.

00:01:08.880 | Whatever the different terminology is, right?

00:01:10.560 | Just grabbing time and attention on-demand, haphazardly as needed

00:01:15.760 | to advance whatever it is that you're working on or interested in

00:01:18.320 | with the minimal amount of overhead for you.

00:01:21.680 | We know that this does not scale when you apply this approach to a whole organization.

00:01:25.440 | What you get out of it is a fraction of the potential output.

00:01:29.200 | It is the knowledge work equivalent of running a car factory where you say, look, guys,

00:01:34.640 | I don't want to tell you how to do your job.

00:01:37.200 | So everyone just rock and roll.

00:01:39.040 | Let's try to get some cars built.

00:01:40.320 | You know, if you need someone to help you with whatever you're working on, just grab them.

00:01:43.120 | You know, yeah, you would produce some cars, but Henry Ford is going to outproduce you a thousand times.

00:01:48.640 | All right.

00:01:49.680 | So that's long-term solution.

00:01:51.680 | Short-term, there are some hacks we can call them that help you get a little bit more breathing

00:01:58.560 | room in this culture while you're still waiting for the culture itself to change.

00:02:01.600 | Both of the hacks I'm going to suggest for you revolve around protecting time on your

00:02:08.640 | shared calendar so that it can't be grabbed for meetings.

00:02:11.440 | And there is a proactive and reactive way to doing this because

00:02:17.520 | you can't just block off all your free time.

00:02:21.520 | So the proactive approach is block off some time to protect yourself.

00:02:25.600 | You can't block off all your free time.

00:02:27.360 | If you block off all your free time, there's no time left for any meetings

00:02:30.960 | in a work culture like you work in, people aren't going to tolerate that.

00:02:34.800 | So I don't want to give you this false hope of like,

00:02:38.080 | just take all your time and block it off so people can't bother you with meetings.

00:02:41.600 | So block off some.

00:02:45.680 | Okay, I know I have this hour and these two hours.

00:02:47.760 | I know what I'm doing in those two hours and it's protected.

00:02:49.680 | So at least my biggest deep work priorities get progressed made up.

00:02:52.560 | But you also have to leave a lot of time free for the meetings that still have to happen.

00:02:57.600 | Now, here's where things get tricky.

00:02:59.120 | You can't simply say, this is the ideal amount of time I want to spend on meetings each week

00:03:06.240 | and then leave exactly that much time free because you have to give flexibility to your colleagues.

00:03:12.800 | They need to have options because their schedule is different than yours.

00:03:15.760 | And you have to find times that works for everyone.

00:03:18.000 | So yes, you can proactively block off some blocks.

00:03:20.640 | This is busy time, you focus on deep work in that time.

00:03:23.920 | At the very least, you know, that time will be spent with deep work.

00:03:26.080 | But you probably have to leave a substantial amount of your time free.

00:03:29.840 | Not that you want to fill all that time with meetings,

00:03:31.760 | but you need to give enough options that you can actually find meeting times that

00:03:35.280 | work with other people.

00:03:36.480 | Again, if you have one hour free each day, people aren't going to tolerate this because

00:03:40.720 | that is effectively no time for each day because it's not going to align with two or three people's

00:03:44.560 | other schedule.

00:03:45.200 | This then puts us into a tragedy of the common situation, though, where you're now leaving,

00:03:50.320 | let's say half your day free so that there's flexibility

00:03:52.960 | for scheduling the meetings that have to happen.

00:03:56.080 | But when everyone sees half your day is free, now everyone's going to come and try to grab as

00:04:00.640 | much of that time as possible and you have too many meetings on the books.

00:04:03.120 | So that second hack I'm going to give here is reactive time protection.

00:04:10.720 | The way I work with reactive time protection is in response to every meeting that gets

00:04:15.840 | scheduled on a day, immediately go and block off and protect an equal duration meeting for

00:04:23.120 | just your own time.

00:04:23.920 | So if someone comes in on Tuesday, let's say you have you've proactively protected about

00:04:29.440 | half your day on Tuesdays, half your day free.

00:04:31.680 | And someone comes in like, okay, we need to use some terrible phrase like we need to circle

00:04:36.640 | back on a call that we jump on to go over the Q4 deck on our quarterly objectives, right?

00:04:43.600 | Or whatever the terrible thing is.

00:04:44.800 | All right.

00:04:46.160 | You have the whole afternoon free so that there's flexibility here and pretty easily

00:04:50.400 | the people involved in this meeting find a time.

00:04:52.960 | They find like three o'clock free.

00:04:54.160 | And so you're not the jerk that has no time free.

00:04:56.400 | Great.

00:04:56.800 | So now you have an hour, 3 to 4 p.m. for that meeting.

00:05:00.160 | Immediately block off another hour that afternoon just for you.

00:05:02.640 | So maybe four to five.

00:05:05.520 | All right, now let's say someone else comes along and, you know, whatever they need to

00:05:09.280 | work on their, their, whatever it is, we need to slack on the client Q4 agenda.

00:05:15.840 | When are you free on Tuesday, they look at the available time and they block from 12

00:05:20.000 | to one to do that call.

00:05:21.040 | And again, you have some good flexibility here.

00:05:22.560 | That's fine.

00:05:23.200 | You say, great, I'm going to now take another hour, maybe two to three.

00:05:25.520 | Boom.

00:05:25.760 | And that's for me, I'm going to make that protected time.

00:05:27.600 | Now, if someone else wants to meet on Tuesday, there is a little bit of time free, but it

00:05:32.960 | might not work.

00:05:33.600 | And they're going to have to move that meeting to another day.

00:05:35.520 | What you have effectively done here is implemented a dynamic system that said, I'm

00:05:39.760 | willing to have a couple hours of meetings in this afternoon.

00:05:42.480 | And I want to have flexibility of when those can fall so that people won't think I'm a

00:05:45.840 | jerk.

00:05:46.160 | I don't want to be the roadblock to figuring out times that work, but I only want two hours

00:05:49.360 | of meetings.

00:05:50.240 | This reactive scheduling hack basically implemented that system.

00:05:54.560 | Two meetings fit.

00:05:55.520 | You were very flexible about where they went, but the rest of the time ended up protected.

00:05:58.800 | And so I think this is a way that you can deal with shared work cultures without the

00:06:04.800 | unsustainable approach of let me block most of my time off in advance.

00:06:09.360 | And so you can give that a try.

00:06:10.640 | But again, your ultimate solution is going to be locking your colleagues in a room, chain

00:06:14.720 | them to the wall.

00:06:15.280 | They have to answer a 10 question detailed quiz correctly about a world without email

00:06:21.760 | before you're going to turn on the light and let them out.

How Do You Time-Block Plan in a Company Obsessed with Last Minute Meetings?

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