☠️ Kill Your Shared Calendar
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Enjoy the 131st Podup, with special thanks to RhinoRating.
Today, we’ll dive into the best insights and ideas from REWORK.
Imagine a day where your time is your own. At 37signals, co-founders Jason Fried and DHH claim to have achieved this. How? By killing shared calendars. They advocate for a more respectful and intentional approach to scheduling, valuing time as a precious resource.
Friction is a feature
We don’t have shared calendars at 37signals. I can’t take time off your calendar. You can’t take time off my calendar. We can’t see each other’s calendars. This is a good thing.
If I need an hour of your time, I have to ask you for it. People say it’s so inefficient. That’s because it is. Modern calendars have made it way too easy to take someone else’s time. It should be hard.
Calendars are like Tetris and meetings are just the little squares. You forget what they mean. The moment you take something away, there’s a before and after, and there’s buffer time around that.
This is the root cause of many problems inside companies. You don’t have control over your time. It’s way too easy to take other people’s time. People treat time as just a square. It’s so much more than that.
Jason Fried
Decline is a terrible word
You can click decline on a calendar, but most of the time people don’t use it. There’s social norms in an organization. You’re not going to decline people left and right. It’s a negative thing to decline someone.
So why would you press decline? Compare this to ‘I can’t make it’, ‘I need to skip this one’, or ‘I’m working on something else’. I’d like to have different ways to respond to the request. Digital calendars are too rigid.
Jason Fried
Why it matters
The goal isn’t to eliminate meetings entirely. Instead, we want to make them less intrusive. We want to maximize as much time as possible for deep, meaningful work. Meetings can still serve as valuable touchpoints for socializing and connecting, especially if you’re fully remote. They just need to be used sparingly.
Next steps
Audit your meetings. Review your meeting schedule and identify which ones are necessary, which ones are good for morale, and which ones can be turned async or stopped entirely.
Make meetings optional. Wherever possible, change the default setting of meetings to optional, allowing team members to opt-in based on their interest and availability.
Encourage an opt-in culture. Lead by example by consciously choosing which meetings you attend and encouraging others to do the same
Improve context with pre-reading. Give people a reason to attend by making it clear what the meeting is about and why it’s important. Send agendas a couple of days in advance.
Check-in bi-annually. Regularly reassess the frequency, format, and value of meetings to ensure they align with your needs and preferences.
Your thoughts?
More from Podup
How are other companies radically changing their meeting culture? See how Shopify is shaking things up.
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Quotes were pulled at different points of the episode. Sentences were left out to make the narrative more concise. Podup is not associated or affiliated with any podcast.