The blog

If you have plen­ty of meet­ings but not plen­ty of time between the meet­ings to do all those things you promised you would do before next meet­ing, you are not alone. Many of my clients fill their days with meet­ings, but have dif­fi­cul­ty find­ing the time for work­ing alone and undis­turbed with the tasks they need to complete.

Meet­ings have a ten­den­cy to be pri­or­i­tized — per­haps because sev­er­al oth­er peo­ple are depend­ing on that we can meet them dur­ing this or that par­tic­u­lar time, while the time we spend work­ing alone only requires one per­son to be present; yourself.

When every week is dif­fer­ent from the next
In spite of this, most of us need a cer­tain num­ber of hours every week when we are not attend­ing meet­ings in order to do all the tasks we have to do on our own.

But, how do we find those hours in a sched­ule filled with engage­ments? Sure, I have pre­vi­ous­ly writ­ten about how we can sched­ule a set num­ber of hours every week which are reserved for work­ing alone on tasks so that we ensure that we have enough ​”space” in our cal­en­dar to actu­al­ly have time for every­thing. But what if some meet­ings tend to be unpre­dict­ed and you hence have dif­fi­cul­ties pre­dict­ing when to sched­ule those hours you need on your own? This would make it hard to real­ly reserve that recur­ring time alone, wouldn’t it?

Well, no. You could always play slid­ing-tile puz­zle with your time.

Do this

1. Take a moment to think about how many hours you need every week which are free from meet­ings. Hard to esti­mate? Then make an edu­cat­ed guess of eight hours per week.


2. Sched­ule eight sep­a­rate hours of alone time some­time dur­ing this week in your cal­en­dar dur­ing the times you would pre­fer to be free from meet­ings if you were to sched­ule your ide­al week. If you already have oth­er things sched­uled dur­ing the time you would most pre­fer to work alone, don’t wor­ry. We’ll get there.


3. Sched­ule the hours as indi­vid­ual hours, even if they are sched­uled con­sec­u­tive­ly. So, do not cre­ate blocks of time. Instead of sched­ul­ing a block of three hours, cre­ate three sep­a­rate book­ings. This way it becomes much eas­i­er to shift and move them around lat­er on.


4. If you are not using one already, cre­ate a cat­e­go­ry or assign a col­or to this time spent work­ing alone so that you can dis­tin­guish it clear­ly when view­ing your upcom­ing week in the calendar.


5. Set all the hours (all eight, for instance) as recur­ring so that they reap­pear in your cal­en­dar every week.


6. Alright, let the game begin. The rules are:
   • One hour of alone-time has to be spent doing things you need your alone-time for. You are not allowed to be dou­ble-booked (so if any ​”alone-time hours” are placed where you actu­al­ly have a meet­ing, they need to be moved now).
   • You can move an hour of alone-time to any free space in the cal­en­dar dur­ing this week, but you can­not trans­fer hours this week onto next week. Mean­ing, you can­not ​”save” an hour for next week.
   • You are not allowed to remove an hour you actu­al­ly need for work­ing alone.


7. Now, open up next week in your cal­en­dar. Rearrange the alone-time hours so that they all fit your sched­ule. If the cal­en­dar-soft­ware asks if you only want to move this par­tic­u­lar unit of time or the whole series, select ​”only this one” or the equiv­a­lent option.


8. Once a week, per­haps as a part of your week­ly run-through, play this slid­ing-tile puz­zle with your alone-time for the next few weeks to come.


9. If you are asked to attend a meet­ing dur­ing a time when you have sched­uled alone-time, the same rules apply. But, you are not allowed to remove the hour, so if there are no oth­er free slots dur­ing the week, you will have to resched­ule the meet­ing for anoth­er week. (There are of course unusu­al, urgent excep­tions when these rules no longer apply, but you will know when these occur.)

Done on time before next meeting
If you play slid­ing-tile puz­zle with the hours you need to spend work­ing alone, you will auto­mat­i­cal­ly get the time you need free from meet­ings every week. You will man­age to do more of the things you promised oth­ers you would do, and will not have to excuse your­self dur­ing the next meet­ing with that ​”you did not have time” to do what you said you would. And, if you are amused by the same things as I, you will enjoy this lit­tle game of time-management.

What is your method?
Do you have a way of ensur­ing that you have all the time you need to com­plete your tasks and assign­ments every week? Per­haps you have your very own method of doing this. Leave a com­ment to share your thoughts.