Calendars + Energy
Time management. Calendar blocking. Color-coded task lists.
You find me this week in the middle of remembering something I am forced to periodically re-teach myself: just because something appears to fit neatly into my calendar doesn’t mean it will neatly fit into my actual day.
Life happens. Days unfold. There are surprises, twists, turns, and distractions.
On good days, there are opportunities, conversations, and nourishing tasks and relationships that take up more space than I had initially allotted. A surprise phone call from a dear friend is a welcome use of my time.
On the less good days, I find myself having to move things around because my leaky faucet has finally forced me to call a plumber. Or an issue doesn’t get solved during the meeting we had laid out, so now other things are going to have to shift until we get this figured out.
COVID-19 brought into sharp relief how little margin most working Americans are working with. From kid drop-off to parent’s medical appointments, from after-hours networking to back-to-back Zooms. U.S. workplace cultures often offer very little breathing room from one hour, day, and week to the next.
For reasons beyond my understanding, being scheduled so tightly that there is no time to pee or eat has become a badge of honor in American workplaces. You’re cool if your response to “How are you?” is “busy!”
American workers understandably bemoan their hours being “on”—expected to pick up a call, respond to a text, and track emails at all hours. But at the same time, they contribute to the very problem plaguing us by setting up our own days and weeks so that there is barely a minute to spare.
Many of us came of age in workplace cultures that normalized back-to-back meetings. Even though this pattern of working is neither good for workers nor the work they are trying to do, for whatever reasons (pressure, bosses’ expectations, etc.) we have kept this unhelpful pattern going.
You’re going to guess what I’m going to say – given that I’ve already shared a “we can stop back-to-back meeting culture” essay. Good news – we can shift and change what is and isn’t normalized. It’s wild to watch grown adults apologize for having stopped by the restroom. It’s nuts to witness people embarrassed to eat because there simply wasn’t time until right this minute. We can and should normalize meeting our basic needs.
We can offer sane alternatives to days that resemble running on a hamster wheel. We can have 30—and 45-minute meetings rather than 60 minutes. We can build in 15 minutes both before and after meetings to organize and map out the tasks and to-dos that emerged from the conversation. You can decline meetings and read through the notes to get the gist.
I recognize some of us don’t have a choice or don’t feel like we have a choice. Both can be true. We have been raising our concerns for some time now, but the cultures we find ourselves in are stubborn to change.
So today, I want to layer on the idea of energy and see if that gets us anywhere.
When I say energy in this context, I mean a combination of attention, focus, and what our body, minds, and hearts can or cannot do at any given moment.
Most of us are familiar with biorhythms and the inner knowing we develop when our brain and our ideas feel most alive. Sort of like when a cat or dog gets the Zoomies, when do you feel most awake? Alert? Open? Available to new ideas, creative problem-solving, and innovative thinking?
Now, I’m not saying we get to coordinate everyone else at our office’s day around my energy’s precise ebbs and flows. But I am saying that at least being more mindful and consciously aware of how my energy does or does not knock into my calendar could bring some valuable noticings that eventually lead to some better ways to map out my days.
For me,
- the energy it requires to be in meetings is different than the energy it requires to do solo thinking or writing
- the energy it takes to read, learn, and absorb new and/or complex information is different than the energy it takes to skim something I already know or know well
- the energy it takes for me to interact with new people is different than the energy it takes to spend time with colleagues I am practiced at collaborating with
- the energy it takes to tackle a conflict in a constructive way is most definitely different than the energy it takes to find alternatives to a technical or logistical problem
How about for you?
If you were to open up your work calendar and scan over the past month or so, what can you observe about where you thought your energy was going to go and where it actually went?
When did you estimate your energy needs and outputs accurately? When did you over or underestimate what kinds of energy it would take to get what you needed to be accomplished?
What could you imagine tweaking, doing ever so slightly differently, that might create the conditions to better match the energy required with the people, projects, and tasks at hand?
I am grateful for this reminder to reset every so often when my calendar is getting stale and just not quite working the way I want it to, even though it looks like everything I want to accomplish theoretically fits into boxes on my screen. Let me know what you notice and try.
More next week,