by Serguey Shinder
It was a week where I could not find two consecutive free hours, and rather than complain about it again I exported twelve months of my calendar into a spreadsheet on a Friday afternoon. It took about fifteen minutes and it was the most useful thing I did that quarter.
Two hundred and ninety one hours in recurring meetings. Not one-off meetings, not incidents, not anything that had arrived because of an actual event. Series. Things that repeat until somebody stops them.
About eighty of those hours belonged to three of them. There was a Wednesday project sync for a project that had shipped in March and had a support rota rather than a project. There was a fortnightly call with a vendor we had stopped using in the summer, still in the diary, still attended by two of us, mostly to discuss whether there was anything to discuss. And there was a Monday triage that had been genuinely important until we built a dashboard that answered every question the triage had been convened to answer.
The Wednesday one is the one I want to describe properly, because it is not a story about laziness. Four people attended it every week for eight months. When I finally asked, in the meeting, who actually needed this, there was a long pause, and then a sort of collective exhale, and it emerged that every one of us had been attending because we assumed it mattered to the other three. We were each being considerate, in a loop, for thirty-two hours of collective effort.
The structural point is simple enough that I am annoyed it took a spreadsheet. Everything else in a working life ends by itself. Tickets close. Projects ship. People change teams and their questions go with them. A recurring calendar series is the only commitment I make that has no natural end, no owner once the person who created it moves on, and no moment at which anybody is required to look at it again. Its continued existence is treated as evidence that it is needed.
So every series I own now has an end date, six months at the most, and it has to be renewed on purpose. Renewing takes ten seconds. About a third of them never get renewed, which is the entire point of the mechanism. And I export the calendar once a quarter.
I got back something like six hours a fortnight. Not by concentrating harder, or by defending my mornings, or by any of the things I had been telling myself I needed to do. I had been trying to find focus inside a week that had already been spent, on my behalf, by a version of me from eighteen months earlier who had every reason at the time.
– Serguey Asael Shinder
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