Protect your time!

As I was scrolling through Mastodon this morning, I saw a post from my friend, Kevin Griffin, and thought I’d expand on it a bit. His post:

He has a point, and it’s something I’ve done for a long time. Of course, it’s been with mixed results, but I’ll get into that a bit later in this post.

Schedule your time before someone else does

The longer I’ve been doing this, the more I see an increase in the number of meetings that end up on my calendar, sometimes to the point where I’m on calls from the start of my day until the end of my day, and that can continue day after day. What sucks is that I still have real work to do. What sucks even more is that I know I’m not alone in this predicament.

A practice I’ve been using for a few years is what Kevin shows in the screenshot above. I’ll block out time during the day, specifically when I know I have critical work that needs to get done, and at those times I want to protect for other reasons like lunch.

I had a friend, mentor, and leader once tell me when I started a new job to always block out lunch as “Family Time.” It’s something I’ve tried to do at all subsequent jobs, but it hasn’t always been effective which is really annoying. Some people just want to see the world burn and schedule meetings over lunch no matter what.

I’m currently working with a team on the west coast and the manager of the team just told me to block out my time starting after 5pm eastern so they wouldn’t be tempted to schedule late meetings for me! Win!!

Final Thoughts

I’m bummed that I have to explicitly block out time to have any chance of getting my tasks done, and I know it’s not always successful because some people either don’t look or don’t care, but it’s something. If it works at least part of the time, I’m happy.

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