All right, let's do a call. I think we have a call here, Jesse, that it's going to set up an even bigger topic I want to discuss. Okay, sounds good. >> Hi, Kel. My name is Vito. I'm an Engineering Manager at a tech company. As an Engineering Manager, I have a lot of meetings, and my calendar is always full.

I'm having a hard time controlling this spiraling calendar, and I would like to ask you, what do you think I could do? I will have a lot of meetings. It is a part of my job I cannot avoid. But right now, I'm having full days with back-to-back meetings, and it is often the case that meetings will be scheduled right after one another.

I do have a good scenario here that I control a lot of these meetings, and when they happen, and I can reschedule them. A lot of them, not all of them, of course, but a lot of them I can. So I do have some control over the duration of these calls, when do they happen, if they meet up against each other or not.

So I would like to ask you, what is your suggestion on controlling this calendar? Should I have a little bit of time between every meeting? Should I schedule a lot of them together so that I have bigger blocks on other parts of my day or maybe other parts of my week?

Then I have some days full and others not. How would you handle a situation where your calendar is full, and you need to have a lot of meetings, but you can move them around a little bit? What's your take on this? >> Well, I mean, Victor, meeting overload is a perennial problem.

I think it's a problem that is worse these days than it's ever been before. So it's a good excuse to talk about meetings. Now, probably the best advice here is to be really weird in an unsettling way, but not a way that directly is going to get you fired, then people just aren't going to want you in the meetings.

This is what I'm going to suggest, and I think this is going to be the solution to your problem, Victor. I want you to come into each of those meetings with a squid on your head. Don't really mention it. Just you come in, you're in the meeting, maybe it smells a little bit weird, and then just throughout the meeting, keep breaking in the volunteer to say, "Can I tell you what I really, really hate?

Squids." Just keep bringing that up and then someone else will be talking and then just say, "Beady eyes, that devilish beak, Satan spawn they are. Yeah, squids, we could do without." I'm telling you, do this enough, the squids on your head, maybe sometimes you come in with a fishing rod, but you don't talk about it.

Do this long enough and people will be like, "No, Victor, we're cool. We'll email you the notes. Don't worry about it. It's unsettling, but it's not like an HR violation. You're not coming in there and being like, "Let me tell you what I hate about people with red hair, it's squids." This doesn't work if your boss is a squid.

Actually, let's be more serious here. I want to use this as an excuse to go through my standard toolbox for taming meetings. There's multiple different tools that can be deployed to tame meetings in exactly Victor's situation, a situation where you can't just not go to meetings. Victor is really clear about this here.

I can't not do these, I can't not do these, don't tell me to stop do these, I can't not do these. Great. A lot of people are in that situation, be it in their office or over Zoom, but it's lots of meetings. I have a toolbox. I'm going to give you this toolbox and you can pick and choose which of these things might work best.

These are all things I've written about before, but I'm going to bring them all together. I have four ideas to share. Idea number 1, meeting buffer. The meeting buffer method is all about working with your calendar in a slightly smarter way. Here's how it works. If you have to set up a meeting and you know how long that meeting is going to be.

Often meetings have hard stop, it's one hour, that's the hard stop. Don't just block out that hour on your calendar, add 15-20 minutes to that block. It's not just if the meeting is supposed to be from 1-2, you have 1-2.15 or 1-2.20 actually blocked off on your calendar. If your calendar is public, everyone sees that as what's blocked off.

If it's not public, you just treat it like any other meeting. I'm next available at 2.15, I'm next available at 2.20. What you then do with this 15-20 minute buffer period is that is where you process everything that came up in that meeting to get it out of your mind, to take the small steps, do the small tasks that could be done right away, to capture in whatever systems you use, the longer term tasks.

It is how you clear out the mental buffer before the next meeting. This is important because its absence can create one of the real killer issues of a heavy meeting schedule, which is you get into a meeting, it generates new obligations and plans and things that's all up there as open loops.

Then you go straight into the next meeting, you haven't dealt with those open loops yet, and now new ones are being generated. It's very stressful. Our minds hates it. We want to shut the door on one thing before we move to the other. Meeting buffers is going to make you feel 50 percent less anxious about a meeting filled day.

Small hack goes a long way. What I'm going to do here is I go through these tools. Each one is going to get a little bit more aggressive, a little bit more radical than the one that follows. Meeting buffers is number 1. Let's now ratchet up the stakes here with tool number 2, which is the one for you, one for me approach to meeting scheduling.

Here's how it works. If I'm putting a meeting on my calendar, I need to then within one week of that date, so let's say five workdays, schedule an equal amount of time that is protected time for me to just work without distraction. You want to put an hour-long meeting on my calendar for Monday, I'm going to find some time on Tuesday where I'm going to break schedule an hour-long work block, deep work block for me.

I don't want to say deep work block, it could be whatever. It could be just get my act together, go through my inbox, just take a breather and try to organize everything that's going on. I don't care what you do in it, but it's a non-meeting block. One-to-one ratio is the default application of this tool.

Two-hour meeting here, I have to find two hours later in the week that I protect. When it's on my calendar, I treat it as a meeting with myself. That time is no longer available for other people to come and take it. Now, as other meetings fill into your calendar, you might have to try to fit these in elsewhere.

But what you'll end up with is enforcing a predetermined ratio of meeting the non-meeting time. I like the one-to-one ratio, one-to-one every minute in a meeting gets a minute of protected time. I like that ratio. You might use different ratios depending on what you do for a living. If you're an executive that is almost always in meetings, that's where most of your work happens.

Maybe it's a two-to-one ratio. So for every meeting, you schedule half that length in undistracted time for yourself, somewhere else in your calendar. On the other hand, maybe if you're in a more concentration forward position, it's a one-to-two ratio. For every hour of meeting here, I'm going to find two hours somewhere else.

But anyways, the key here is you're being intentional about what ratio you want your time to be collaborative versus individual concentration. And you're taking advantage of the calendar and the social and professional convention around this time is blocked. So it's not available to actually enforce that ratio. All right, idea number three.

Again, let's ratchet up a little bit. Wage war on "standing meetings." Now in academia, this is a killer. I think this is a killer in a lot of other places as well. It is people who have been assigned, okay, we're working on this obligation. Here is a project that, you know, me and Jesse and this other person have been assigned to work on.

This is an open obligation. I'm stressed. Like, how am I going to make progress on this? I don't listen to Cal Newport. So I don't do multi-scale planning. What is the easiest thing you can do in that moment to assuage your anxiety about making progress on a project? You say, I know what we'll do.

All right, Jesse. All right, other guy. Standing meeting. Let's just get a meeting on repeat. So we know at the very least every week, Tuesday at 2.30, that we get together on Zoom and we talk about this thing. And now I can be like, "Hoo, this will be, you know, not forgotten because I trust meetings on my calendar." This can completely take over your calendar with all of these different standing meetings, one for everything you're working on, where the actual amount of useful collaboration that happens is often very little.

Like, sometimes the meeting is a forcing function for you to do something, but it clogs up your calendar. It's a big source of calendar congestion. So wage war on them. Replace standing meetings with much more concrete processes for how you're going to make progress on this specific project. So you don't say, let's just meet Tuesdays at 2.30.

You say, well, okay, what is the next thing that needs to happen here? We need a draft of this client report with some commentary. Great. Jesse, you have the ball here. Write that report. You write that draft. Once you have a good draft, put it into this Google doc in this folder, like a shared doc where we can see it.

Send us a note to say it's ready. That will start a 24 hour timer for us to look at it. Get it done this week. And look, I have a standing office hours on Fridays. That will be the time, like if I have any big questions, or you have any big questions, come meet me there.

I don't know. I'm thinking about this out loud, but my point is it's specific and it's concrete. What is the next thing that has to happen for this project? Okay. Who's doing it? How do they signal they're done? What happens after they're done? How do we get to the next step?

So it's not just let's meet again next Tuesday. It's let's do this specific work and here's how it's going to unfold. So replacing standing meetings with concrete project specific processes for how you're going to get to the next step is way more effective than let's just get on Zoom every week and small talk for a while and then kind of make excuses for why we didn't get things done.

All right. So the last thing I want to recommend for waging or tackling meetings, ratcheting up again, is office hours plus reverse meetings. Office hours are great. Regular times that you are available. This time on these days, I'm always available. You can come into my office. My phone is on.

I have a Zoom window open if you're in a hybrid environment. No appointment necessary. Come grab me. That is great on its own. It allows, for example, small issues to be taken care of without having to have asynchronous back and forth conversations or hold dedicated meetings. Just stop by my office hours and we'll chat about it, right?

That's great. But it can be used to implement this more aggressive notion that I call the reverse meetings concept. Subscribers to my newsletter have heard me talk about this. A little chance for a plug, by the way. If you don't subscribe to my newsletter, you should. calnewport.com. I've been writing that since 2007, roughly one article per week about all the types of stuff I talk about here.

Plug ended. So the reverse meeting concept leverages office hours in a way that I think is quite powerful. Here's how it works. The standard way meetings unfold is I need your help. This three or four people's help on something I'm trying to work on. I need some input. I need to assign them some tasks.

The standard thing to do is I'm gonna organize an hour long meeting. So now six of us have to give up an hour of our time to come to this meeting so that I can make progress on this thing that I'm trying to work on. So that's six total man hours of time obligation generated by a meeting.

Reverse meetings leverages office hours to significantly reduce that footprint. It says, okay, if I need help, feedback or assignments from each of you, five or six people, to make progress on this meeting, I am going to go to each of your office hours one by one. I will come to you.

I'm not gonna force you all to come to me and take this time out of your schedule. I'll come to you in time you've already put aside for types of quick discussions. And with each of you, I'll, hey, what do you think about this? Could you take this on?

Now let's say on average, I talk to each of you for 10 minutes. Now that's less convenient for me because your office hours might be spread out. So I have to take three days and remember to go to talk to each of you. The onus is on me. I have to do more work.

But let's look at the total man hour footprint of what just happened. Before we had six people spending an hour, six total hours of time being taken away from other types of pursuits. In this setup, it is significantly less. There's me doing 10 minutes with five other people. So if we wanna add that up, we do 50 minutes times two because it's the time I'm spending, the time you're spending.

So now we're less than two hours. We're closer to an hour and a half total footprint. So we've reduced this footprint by a significant amount. We have also made the life easier for these other five people. Me coming to your office hours, we are already there taking calls and having people coming in and chatting with you for 10 minutes is a no op in terms of an impact on your schedule.

It was time you'd already set a time for that. That's such a less of a injury to your schedule than you having to actually put aside a full hour that you've now lost outside of your office hours to doing this discussion. The only person who maybe has to do slightly more work in this is me because I have to coordinate and go to each of you and spread out my meeting over multiple days.

But you know what? Good. It should be harder to call a meeting than it is. You know, the person generating the meeting should do more work than the people who have to attend. So use office hours as the foundation for doing reverse meetings. There's so much that can get organized without having to actually put aside extra bespoke periods of conversation for each individual project that some conversation requires.

So that's my toolkit. Meeting buffers, one to one ratio, one for you, one to me on your scheduling. Replace standing meetings with concrete progress and process and use office hours to switch from standard meetings to reverse meetings. All of those things will really help. There you go. The great thing about summer for professors, Jesse, is meetings go away.

- No more meetings, baby. - No more meetings. - And no more meetings for you this fall either, right? - Well, no meetings, some of that's not teaching. - Oh, you still have meetings. - Yeah, so summertime, I'm off the clock. - You still have to go to the meetings.

- Well, but in like summertime, I'm not a professor. - Oh, sorry. - Yeah, yeah, so like in summertime, I pay my own way. I'm on a 10 month salary at Georgetown. So I can do whatever. This fall, I'm on teaching leave. So I don't have to teach, which does save a lot of time, but it's not, it's also just normal academic life still happens, so meetings and this and that.

And I don't think they're gonna put up with it, and rightly so. I think we're probably past that period where it's like, I'm just gonna have to zoom into this faculty meeting because, you know, the virus or this or that. I think we're probably past those point now. Everyone's had COVID three times.

I think like we're probably gonna be back to you gotta come in. You know, the Dean wants to meet with you. You're coming to meet with the Dean. We're having a faculty meeting. You're coming in for the faculty meeting. I mean, maybe not, I don't know. Academia is slow about that stuff.

- I think a lot of the other professors were probably pushed back too. So you wouldn't be alone. - Yeah, well, if anyone asks, I'm incredibly worried about, here's the problem with, I can say I'm incredibly worried about picking up COVID so I can't come to the meetings, but we've been teaching in full classrooms for a long time at this point.

So it's kind of hard to argue that like, the thing I'm really worried about is the 20 minutes that's me and you in an office, not the 50 kids that I'm lecturing to. But it'll be good. I've missed the campus is nice. It'll be nice. 'Cause I build days around it.

- Yeah, you can get to the gym too. - Yeah, I can get to the gym. I can work in their libraries. It's like a nice change of environment. - I mean, it's a sweet campus. - It really is nice, yeah. (upbeat music) (upbeat music)