Calendar as Boss
Every calendar of every person in the organization should reflect movement toward the goals of the organization.
A calendar entry is evidence of a link between goals and roles. Yet in most organizations, it’s hard to see a connection between how we spend our time as leaders and the organization's actual goals.
Here’s a test to prove the point: Go through the last 2 weeks of your calendar and connect each meeting or activity directly to the organization's goals. In most cases, it will be hard to do. We generally spend our time on things that aren’t strategic, and that is a dangerous place for a leader to be.
Our approach is to adopt a “Calendar as Boss” philosophy. That simply means we stop freestyling it and scrutinize every activity and meeting on our calendar for its strategic value.
We start with these 3 key concepts:
Human physics apply. In other words, we humans need time to sleep, time to disconnect and relax, and food for fuel. Yet, as leaders, we often deny that these principles of human physics are at work in our lives. We don’t disconnect, we don’t eat, we don’t sleep. We believe ourselves to be superhuman. And since we are not, eventually, burnout will catch up with us. At that point, our performance will decline, and we risk losing our jobs.
We all have the same 24 hours. There is a fixed capacity for the time we have, including work. And if the time is fixed, we must do a superb job of allocating it. That’s where “Calendar as Boss” says, if it is important, it is on your calendar. No more to-do lists (gasp) because they don’t have a time allocation assigned to them. If something must be done, we estimate the time it will take and then put it on the calendar. Will we need to move things around on occasion, of course. But we are clearly allocating the required time on our calendar. As an aside, research indicates that the human brain can sustain about 6 hours of productive work. Anything beyond that is suboptimized performance riddled with mistakes and poor judgment.
Every hour is full. If your calendar is boss, then you have every hour filled in with meetings, projects, times of reflection, family time, events, everything on one calendar. At the end of the week, you will review anything that didn’t get done and move it forward in your calendar. You will review upcoming meetings to make sure you really, really need to be there (Note: If you and one of your direct reports are at the same meeting and neither is required to make a decision, then it’s likely that one of you needs to skip the meeting. Delegate authority to them, and they can report back later. No overlap.)
So, that’s what life looks like when we live by the “Calendar as Boss” concept. Drastic, probably. Efficient, you bet. Take the leap and give it a try.
